


Descent

by LivEinziger



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Crimes & Criminals, Drama, Eventual Romance, Eventual Smut, F/M, Family Drama, Father Figures, Father-Daughter Relationship, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Romance, Sexual Tension, Suspense, Undercover
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-26
Updated: 2021-01-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:00:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 29,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27725846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LivEinziger/pseuds/LivEinziger
Summary: A mysterious old man shows up at SVU with information he will only give to one person, but when the statute of limitations prevents Olivia and Elliot from pursuing his leads, they must move on to a heinous murder case that requires them to go undercover as a waitress and bartender. Meanwhile, the man's disturbing past and a possible connection with him still haunt one of them. EO.
Relationships: Dani Beck/Elliot Stabler, Elliot Stabler/Kathy Stabler, Olivia Benson/Elliot Stabler, Olivia Benson/Original Male Character(s)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 14





	1. New normal

1 - NEW NORMAL

  
  
  


The sharp, colorful lights were fighting the dark, reflecting on his eyes and turning them into two blue beams projected almost continuously on her skin while she kept close by, too aware of her short, tight clothes, heavy make-up, and the sound of dangling metal hanging from her ears over the country music coming from the speakers. 

Everything around was supposed to remind her, but still, it was quite an effort for Olivia to keep in mind that this was a world of pretend while it seeped unceremoniously through her every layer, effortlessly installing like an operating system, becoming the new normal in the background of her mind. New normal was what her life was all about these days – especially in the last few. 

Not very much was going on, which apparently was not unusual for an ordinary Tuesday night. The place was nearly empty, but for one of their regulars who sat at the bar exchanging the occasional grunt with Elliot between refills, and a few lone drinkers whose tables probably saw them more often than their wives did. 

Olivia was waiting for any of them to make a sign that they needed anything, but they all sat perfectly quiet, the smoke of their cigarettes the only movement coming from their direction as it lifted and faded into the still air.

She  _ knew  _ Elliot was supposed to be staring at her like that, but such intel didn’t stop the chills from traveling down her spine and her stomach from fluttering in response. Her peripheral vision caught it when the man sitting at the counter’s stare followed his to find her, but she pretended to be completely oblivious while she moved towards the bar with both pairs of eyes weighing down on her.

“Hey,” she purred as she approached Elliot from behind, her fingers skimming the whole length of his bulky arm before her hand settled on his shoulder, her mouth ghosting over the back of his neck. She kissed the skin softly. “I’m bored.”

He smirked at the customer sitting across from him while Olivia noticed the man’s eyes ogling her body, measuring every inch. Elliot’s hand reached behind him and gripped at her bare waist below her cropped top and above her low-cut shorts.

“Baby, I’m working,” he rumbled, but his thumb disagreed, sinking into the skin of her stomach as she reached his ear, her lips nibbling at his earlobe. His voice lowered in pitch. “Go check on the tables.”

“They’re all empty,” she whined, snaking her other hand up his chest, her fingertips brushing lightly at the skin exposed by the opening in his flannel shirt before sliding all the way down, past his belt as she cautiously hooked her thumb into the front pocket of his jeans. She smiled inwardly as he fidgeted – you can’t fake that kind of reaction. 

“Not all of them,” he turned his head in her direction, briefly making eye contact, then turned back to the customer, almost apologetic. “She’s impossible.” 

The bearded man smiled, looking like he was enjoying the show with a cigarette trapped between his index and middle finger as his hand clutched the tumbler in the air, unmoving in its path between the mahogany and his mouth. 

“You gotta keep ‘em satisfied,” he said, finally taking the glass to his lips, his eyes never faltering from Olivia, glued to her even through the translucent, caramel-colored liquid. 

She decided to take it up a notch, flicking her tongue over Elliot’s neck, the smell of aftershave and cologne blending seamlessly with the salty taste of sweat. She felt him shudder slightly and closed her eyes, wishing they were somewhere else entirely. 

“You got that right,” Elliot grinned at the man a moment later, turning around in a swift motion and pulling Olivia to him with both hands firmly clasped on her ass. 

His lips burned against hers, but his tongue was cold, still mimicking the beer he’d been sipping just before. He wasted no time, raising a hand to cup the back of her head for leverage as he deepened the kiss with confident strokes that drove her lightheaded. To finish the job, he nudged his knee between her legs, letting his thigh stroke her lightly and making her lose her footing for a second. She shifted her weight so it would seem like a mere balance issue, even though she knew he knew better. 

You can’t fake that kind of reaction.

The hand he still had on her backside gave her a tight squeeze before his mouth left hers. It took her a second to be able to open her eyes again, and when she did, his were waiting for her, alight with that particular shade of fire that burns blue. 

“Now go,” he directed, his hand lazily sliding up from her ass to her back before withdrawing completely. “We’ll finish this conversation later.”

Olivia swallowed hard at the innuendo in his voice, thanking the heavens she was supposed to look just as breathless as she did, just as infatuated as she felt. 

“I’ll hold you to that,” she exhaled, running a hand across her hair and throwing a glance at the bearded man who still eyed her shamelessly, seeming like he was stopping short of letting drool pour from the corner of his mouth. 

She grabbed her previously-abandoned notepad and pen and walked away, not looking back but leaving behind the sway of her hips that she knew both men were examining carefully as she sauntered between the tables, offering to take any orders. 

“Feeling hungry tonight, daddy?” she tilted her head to the side with a smile as the old man sitting at the last occupied table let his eyes wander up and down her figure.

“I could eat,” he smiled, beer in hand. “What do you recommend, honey?”

Olivia grasped the napkin holder in front of him with her slender fingers and long, fiberglass nails and turned it around, revealing a small list of options. “Did you get a chance to look at the specials?”

While the man momentarily looked down and away from her to check it out, Olivia used the opportunity to throw a tentative glance toward Elliot, and he was standing there, immobile, observing her every move with those smoldering eyes, so intensely that she had to look away even as her lower lip got caught under her front teeth.

“I was hoping you’d be one of the specials,” the man answered quite boldly. Now Olivia looked pointedly at Elliot, and he must have understood the message as his eyes moved to the man instead of her for a second. 

“Sorry, sir,” she smiled innocently, then angled her chin toward the bar. “I don’t think my boyfriend would like that very much. I’ll bring you the menu, though, so you can see all your options.”

“Thanks, doll,” the man nodded, then pointed at his long-necked bottle, already emptied by two thirds, and spoke with a crooked smile, looking eager to see her walk away. “Bring me another one of these, too, would ya?”

“Of course, coming right up.”

She rolled her eyes as she turned, feeling a tinge of excitement course through her at the words  _ my boyfriend _ that still echoed in her head, while Elliot’s teeth still echoed on her lips where he’d lightly sunk them down. She bit her own lip again, but it wasn’t the same, and it did nothing to erase the feeling of his mouth fusing with hers.

In her haze, it almost escaped her – the slender silhouette of a man moving slowly to a table in the furthest corner from where she stood, his haphazard walk just as distinctive as the look in his round, brown eyes. When they landed on her, even from afar, she couldn’t avoid her shivering surprise as she recognized the man who had just walked in.

Her father. 

  
  
  


***

  
  
  


ONE WEEK EARLIER

  
  


Olivia slept through the alarm that morning. She woke up wondering where she was and when –  _ is it Saturday? _ It wasn’t. When she realized it was already almost 8AM on an ordinary Tuesday morning, she rushed to shower and get dressed, forgoing any ideas of breakfast. 

It was just a Tuesday, and this was her apartment, and this was supposed to be her reality… But everything still felt so foreign. She’d been struggling a little since she’d gotten back from Oregon. As much as she had dreamed of coming back to her life in New York the whole time she’d been away, that didn’t mean her return was seamless; actually, it was far from it.

Work had been the first clue of the impact of six weeks undercover without any contact. Obviously, the perps hadn’t decided to take any time off just because she was working an undercover assignment for the FBI, and similarly, the Manhattan Special Victims Unit had continued its operations without her, business as usual. Her desk hadn’t been left void for very long either – some woman named  _ Dani Beck  _ had filled in for her so the team wouldn’t be incomplete. 

So  _ he  _ wouldn’t have to work alone.

But she was gone now, and Olivia had her job back, her partner back, her desk back. Not that it made the traces go away – the traces of someone else having sat on her chair, the stray items she had left behind in her departure, like a couple packets of gum in Olivia’s drawer, a defective key on her keyboard, and her partner’s newfound love for casual clothes.

But  _ she was gone now _ , and Olivia needed to focus on that. It was quite evident that something had happened between this Dani Beck and Elliot – something he wasn’t eager to disclose to her and, frankly, she wasn’t eager to discover. She knew she wasn’t going to like whatever it was. Just knowing she had sat across from him in the squad room and next to him in the car during stakeouts already bothered her enough, if she was really honest.

Even the most basic things weren’t easy to get used to after coming home, like her clothes: many of them seemed so unfamiliar to her that she had to struggle to remember buying them. Or her bedroom: no one had slept in it while she’d been gone, but she’d grown so used to sleeping in couches and makeshift beds while she’d been under that her bed was suddenly a bit too comfortable. There was too much space, too much silence, and too many thoughts in her head to keep her awake for hours on end.

And so, some mornings it was difficult for her to wake up. Some mornings, she didn’t know where she was, if she was really Olivia again or if she was supposed to go by Persephone James, if she was allowed to mumble Elliot’s name in her sleep or if someone might be listening. Some mornings, she woke up craving coffee, forgetting she had given it up. 

Some mornings, she had no idea where she was in the middle of all that had changed and all that had remained the same.

A little over a half-hour after waking up in that state of confusion, she arrived, flustered, at the 16th precinct, trying hard to stay under the radar, but people seemed to be staring at her, from the entrance to the elevator to the hallways. Could this all be about her tardiness? She wasn’t  _ that  _ late, she reckoned. Or was it all in her head?

Even though she rationally knew better, Olivia couldn’t help but feel like she had something to prove. She had been replaced, after all, and now that her replacement had left, she felt like she needed to earn her spot again. She saw some people she didn’t recognize, possibly rookies, new transfers – more evidence that time had passed while she’d been gone. Sometimes she felt like people looked at her like  _ she  _ was a rookie or a new transfer, not someone who had been working in that building for nine years.

Maybe she was just being paranoid, and no one was really staring, and no one really gave a rat’s ass who she was or what her story was. That was possibly the safest bet. And even if they were staring and wondering who she was or why she was late, there was no reason to panic: the relevant people knew exactly who she was, and they weren’t even in the middle of a case or anything that required her immediate presence, so while she was a bit behind schedule, she believed that the countless all-nighters she’d already pulled in her years in the force had to count for a little forgiveness. 

After a while, however, it became quite obvious that Olivia wasn’t just being paranoid. Apparently, the closer she got to the squad room, the more people would stare. She started staring back, and to an officer she actually mouthed,  _ what’s going on? _ , which went unanswered but for a sly nod in the general direction of the interrogation rooms. 

She rushed in toward her desk to find Elliot standing, apprehensiveness all over his demeanor, and he fidgeted as he saw her, turning towards Munch and Fin’s empty desks and the captain’s office with something clearly weighing on his mind. “Liv, hey…”

Of course, there was the possibility that Elliot’s agitation didn’t have anything to do with her being late either. 

They were still finding their footing together again. They’d been having a hard time reconnecting, their overwhelming familiarity standing in their way instead of helping. They knew each other well enough to push each other’s buttons but they just couldn’t seem to push the right ones for each situation, the dashboard of their relationship suddenly a mystery.

They had tried to address the strain in their partnership after having some issues with each other during a case. She had sat with him on his stoop in the middle of the night, drinking her tea while he drank her peace offering – a coffee that smelled way too good as it fumigated in his hands. It had occurred to her then that it smelled like something she shouldn’t have, just like him. 

Even though he’d told her that he had signed his divorce papers.

That was something else that put them in complete imbalance. Their boundaries had always been so clear, that wedding band the ideal reminder of exactly where they couldn’t go and the perfect alibi for whenever they came too close to going there. Now, it was gone, and with all the other changes she was still trying to adapt to, it made her feel really helpless that she couldn’t tell exactly where she stood with him.

That she couldn’t tell if those divorce papers granted her forbidden feelings any right to exist. To manifest. Even in the best hidden corners of her mind. Even only mumbled in her sleep in the loneliness of her bedroom.

Olivia could sense that he wanted to say something else on top of his tentative greeting in those two seconds that had elapsed as they stared at each other, disoriented, her mind assaulted by all those hesitations about him. She glanced at her watch again: it was almost 9:40AM, but she wasn’t getting any closer to understanding the reason for all the commotion, and he wasn’t making a move to clarify anything.

“What’s going on?” she risked almost under her breath, a bit fearful of the answer at this point.

Elliot moved his mouth like he meant to reply, but he was interrupted by Cragen’s fast-paced march towards them in a beeline from his office. “Olivia, nice of you to join us.”

“I’m sorry, Captain, it’s just…” she started to explain, but he waved it away. 

“Forget it, I need you to come with me,” her captain said, and Olivia’s heart raced with anxiety: if this wasn’t about her tardiness, then what was it about?

They walked to the interrogation rooms with Elliot on their heels. She turned to exchange a few inquisitive looks with him, but he didn’t seem to have much more intel to give her, a notion that she needed to see whatever it was with her own eyes silently implied. When they arrived at Interrogation Room 1, Cragen put a hand to Olivia’s back, coaxing her to walk faster towards the two-way glass. 

Finally standing in front of it, she saw a man sitting there, alone, apparently in his sixties, but maybe a bit thinner than the healthy weight for his age. He had a head full of hair, salt-and-pepper in color, and he wore square-rimmed glasses over his round, brown eyes. He had his arms crossed and sat leaning back against the chair, looking peaceful, maybe bored, wearing a black polo t-shirt. A quite ordinary man, it seemed like. 

After taking in all those details, Olivia turned to Cragen again. “Who’s that?”

“I was hoping you could tell me,” was the captain’s reply, his lips pursed and his brow furrowed as he sighed and shoved his hands into his pockets. 

Olivia shook her head, her gaze chasing Elliot’s for any sort of explanation, but he was looking into the room as well, pinching his chin in what seemed like a worried stance. 

“What do you mean?” she asked, her patience circling the drain. It felt like she’d missed the meaning of an obvious joke. “What the hell is going on?”

Cragen took a deep breath and exchanged a look with Elliot before taking a step back and letting him take over. 

Elliot swallowed, approaching Olivia cautiously and starting to explain it in that low voice he always used when he gave her upsetting news. “This man showed up here, about twenty minutes ago, claiming to have information about several rapes.”

Olivia waited for him to finish, but he was either done or taking a dramatic pause. She turned to Cragen then back to him, her eyes wide with urgency. “Okay. What rapes? What’s his name, what do we know?”

Elliot shrugged, apparently looking for the words. 

“That’s the thing,” Cragen intervened, definitely impatient himself. “We don’t really know anything because he refuses to talk.”

Olivia’s heart was beating so hard that she could feel it in her throat, hear it in her ears above all other sounds. Even her own voice. “Why?”

Elliot took another step and lowered his voice another octave. “He says he’ll only speak to you.”


	2. Thin air

2 - THIN AIR

  
  
  


“I’ve been waiting for you.”

That was the first thing the man who had been sitting by himself inside the interrogation room for the past twenty minutes said when he saw Olivia walking in, the foreboding in his voice sending Elliot’s heart racing as he watched from outside.

“So I’ve heard,” she said as she pulled the other chair, the rusty sound of metal scraping the floor before she took a seat. She looked intent on cutting to the chase as she crossed her legs and smiled, doing a very good job of hiding the myriad of emotions Elliot knew were hitting her all at once. “My colleagues told me you knew my name and wanted to speak to me. Why?”

Sometimes it still felt unreal to be looking at her. She had come back the same way she had left – without warning. One day, he just didn’t find her back at the station or on the other end of her disconnected phone number, like she’d fallen off the face of the Earth. Almost two months later, she had materialized in a hospital room where he was interviewing a witness and jumped right into asking questions, like she’d never been away. 

As Olivia stared down the man sitting across from her, Elliot once again took in the new length of her hair, pulled back in a high, messy ponytail, and the novelty of the bangs now gracing her forehead as they diverged from the well-known light blue sweater and golden necklace glinting against her chest. Somehow, she looked even more beautiful than he remembered, even as she barely wore any make up – which he knew could probably be explained by the delay in her arrival this morning. 

The delay that had made him pace nervously through the bullpen earlier, equipped with the excuse to get another cup of coffee or another file from the cabinet in order to hide the persistent anxiety that had nothing to do with work. 

Elliot got anxious now whenever Olivia didn’t show up where she was supposed to be. He was afraid she would just disappear into thin air again.

The man facing her seemed to be in no hurry to answer her question or do anything at all for that matter. Elliot noticed he wasn’t even wearing a watch while she still looked flustered from the rush to get to the precinct and probably from the adrenaline boiling just underneath the surface of her overall-controlled exterior, as well as on his own side of the glass. The old man just shrugged. “I read about you in the paper a few times. Your name stuck with me.”

Olivia’s smile widened as she had yet to completely catch her breath, and Elliot knew her keenness to look collected before the self-alleged perp wasn’t helping. He knew she was still adjusting to being back. This job was who she was, and theoretically she hadn’t been away for that long, but it felt like a lot had changed. She seemed different, and he knew he was different, too. It was almost like getting to know each other again, the rush into their old familiarity falling short as a failed endeavor.

She took her thumb to her forehead and rubbed slowly with a scoff before looking at him again, her lips pressed together with frustration. “You’re gonna have to do a little better than that. Why are you here?”

“I told them outside, I wanna come clean,” he replied matter-of-factly. Patiently, even. “I did some bad things, and I wanna make ‘em right before I die.”

There was a difference between having information about several crimes and  _ having done some bad things _ , and Olivia’s quick glance at the glass reflected Elliot’s reaction as he acknowledged it. Maybe the point of observing should be to keep his eyes on the man they were trying to gather information on, he reminded himself while he otherwise ignored his own implied reprimand and watched Olivia intently as her head tilted and her eyes squinted, like she hadn’t heard the man right. “Before you die?”

“I’m sick. Cancer.” He clicked his tongue with a smirk, like he wasn’t saying anything too serious, just mentioning an unfortunate mishap, and while the thought hadn’t necessarily occurred to Elliot, he figured it made sense that the man was sick, with his difficulty walking, the lack of color on his prematurely-aged face and the way he seemed to be a few pounds below the weight range for his height.

Olivia swallowed hard, hunching her shoulders back toward the chair. Her voice became deeper. The guy was playing at her empathy, and it was working despite her best efforts to stay impartial. “I’m sorry.”

One corner of the man’s mouth turned up in a crooked smile. “You won’t be after you hear about the things I’ve done.”

The push and pull game the man seemed to be playing sounded ominous to Elliot as he put the pieces of the puzzle together: after making Olivia feel sorry for him one minute, the man had just told her she was about to find out he wasn’t worthy of the sentiment. The calculated way he was dealing with her in addition to the fact that he had singled her out was making it all only look bleaker in Elliot’s mind.

“Which are…” her eyes narrowed even further as she clearly tried to move it along. Elliot could see she didn’t appreciate the attempt to play mind games with her.

“I’m a rapist,” the man’s voice was dry, and if any part of his admission was remorseful, it didn’t become apparent. This was actually the first thing he said that he seemed to be taking seriously.

Elliot contemplated it in her every muscle as Olivia tried to suppress any reactions, but she couldn’t just pretend she was immune to a categorical confession like that – he didn’t know that anybody had that power, well aware of his nails biting into his palms inside his own tight fists. He changed his focus to the perp momentarily as he thought about how watching his words ripple through her seemed to be the very reason this man had come out the woodwork. 

It was all a game, the invisible board laid out on the table, and Elliot hated the fact that he didn’t know any of the rules. Olivia alone in there looked like a sacrificial pawn, and that was the worst part for him. 

So far, she was doing a pretty good job of keeping her cool under the circumstances, though. “And you wanna tell me about your victims?”

“Yes,” her adversary confirmed, calm, composed, his body in the same position he had been sitting all along.

Olivia nodded slowly, mirroring his stillness. “Okay… Why don’t you start by telling me your name?”

The man pondered for a minute. “You can call me Paul for now.”

“Paul?” she echoed with another almost imperceptible head movement towards the glass, and Elliot nodded back even though he knew she couldn’t see it.

If his bullshit detector was correct, that was certainly not the man’s real name, but he seemed determined to stay in control of everything, which certainly included this crucial information. “Yeah, Paul.”

Olivia smiled and sat back, crossing her arms. “Okay, Paul… You wanna start telling me your story? I’ve got all day.”

Elliot smiled at her perfectly-feigned nonchalance.

“Sure,”  _ Paul  _ smiled back, his own indifference cracking now. “I wanna start with Jackie.”

“Jackie,” Olivia repeated, delicately urging him on.

He sighed, as though revisiting a fond memory, his eyes wandering as if the pieces were projected on the walls. “She was graduating high school with my brother.”

“Son of a bitch,” Elliot muttered to the captain next to him. “He knows we can’t charge him. Statute of limitations.”

“Let her work him,” Cragen appeased. “He wants to tell her his story from the beginning. Who knows, maybe the ending actually involves a more recent victim.”

Olivia didn’t falter, still looking like an avid listener. “And how old were you?” 

“I don’t know,” Elliot shook his head. “Looks to me like he just wants to push her buttons. But why? And why her?”

His stomach churned as his mind restarted running all the possible scenarios for a middle-aged rapist fixating on Olivia. 

“I was just starting college,” Paul went on, moving his body forward on the chair and leaning his forearms on the table. Elliot wondered if he noticed the very slight trepidation in Olivia as she registered the loss in inches between them. “She was beautiful. She had long, blond hair and these gorgeous, blue eyes. She wore this ribbon around her hair sometimes…” His wistful smile disappeared all of a sudden. “But she wouldn’t give me the time of day.”

Olivia’s lips puckered with interest as she boldly copied his motion, interlacing her fingers as her arms came to share the space on the table with his, closing the gap a little more. “Why not?”

“I don’t know,” Paul waved a hand, his glance now less discrete as it raked her features. “High school girls were supposed to be into college boys, right?”

“Right,” Olivia smiled, and Elliot wondered if she was recalling an experience of her own, a tinge of discomfort making itself known in the back of his throat. 

Maybe Paul was wondering the same thing as he grinned with a knowing look; was he feeling jealous imagining Olivia with someone else? Why? What sort of fixation was this he had with her? Did he want her for himself? His voice came out vaguely spiteful when he spoke again. “But Jackie wasn’t interested. She already had a boyfriend.”

“Was he also your brother’s classmate?” Paul was silent for a moment, and Elliot understood. So did Olivia, her eyebrows arched as she answered her own question. “ _ He _ was her boyfriend.”

“I’m not proud of myself,” Paul looked away. “I just wanted her to notice me. One day, she arrived early, and I was home alone. My brother was out playing basketball, and I told her to come inside and wait for him…”

Elliot saw the uneasiness in Olivia’s expression even if no one else could, the air growing thinner to her nostrils only. “What did you do?”

Paul cocked his head to the side. “I tried to kiss her… She wasn’t having it.”

“Did you stop trying when she said no?” Olivia asked, almost too eager, and Elliot bit his lower lip, apprehension building in the pit of his stomach.

Paul’s eyes remained glued on hers. “No.”

She nodded, making a visible effort to keep her features in check, but her voice was barely above a whisper and gave her away as she prepared herself for the gory details she was about to request. “What happened next?”

“I was a lot stronger than her… I had no difficulty restraining her.” Paul made a pause, during which he looked at Olivia tentatively for a second before looking away again. Could he be…ashamed? “I…I had sex with her.”

Olivia swallowed, her eyes now glistening with poorly-contained anger. “Did she want to have sex with you?” she asked through semi-clenched teeth.

Paul shrugged, still looking down. “No.”

“Then it wasn’t sex,” she barked, and Elliot saw her chin quivering ever so slightly.

“Alright,” the man conceded, waving his hands in surrender. “I raped her.”

“Yes you did, you son of a bitch,” Elliot whispered, watching the same thought filter through Olivia’s eyes while she kept her mouth sealed.

“And what did Jackie do?” she asked, already back in control of her features.

Paul’s eyes looked devoid of any emotion as he spoke. “She cried. She tried to scream, so I gagged her.”

Olivia sucked in a shaky breath. “I meant…if she did anything about it. Did she say anything to anyone?” 

“She tried to tell my brother…” he shrugged. “He didn’t believe her. Thought she cheated on him with me, broke up with her. Didn’t speak to me for years.”

Olivia nodded, failing to conceal a sigh Elliot knew originated in her heartbreak for the victim. She held her head up again with renewed strength to speak. “You never heard of her again?”

Paul’s reply was a dismissive shake of his head. A second later, a look of fascination took over, and Elliot could hardly keep up as he switched between looking ashamed and proud of his actions all the while shooting Olivia the occasional look so as to gauge the effects of his words on her “It was…it was like nothing I’d ever felt before. I felt so…powerful. I just… _ knew _ I was gonna do it again.”

Olivia’s muscles tensed visibly now. “So Jackie was only the first one?” She seemed in a rush to move on, aware that there was no point delving any further into the details of an old rape case she wasn’t going to be able to do anything about.

Paul nodded slowly and scratched his chin absentmindedly, a hint of a smile poorly hidden. “She was.”

“But there were others,” she demanded, impulsive.

“Easy, Liv,” Elliot sighed, touching the glass with his forehead and willing her to take it down a notch. 

Whether motivated by Olivia’s impatience or not, Paul seemed to be growing somewhat restless himself. He fidgeted in place, not offering many clues as to what his thoughts were now. “Yes…a few. Over the years,” was his vague response.

Olivia picked up on it, still watching him closely and making a visible effort to rein in her anxiety. “Tell me about them,” she urged softly. 

Paul took a deep breath. “Later,” he said abruptly. “I’m getting tired now.”

“What do you mean?” she asked with pleading eyes initially, then applying a coat of innuendo, undoubtedly intended to massage his ego. “I cleared my schedule for you.”

“I’m sorry to cut this short, but I’ll be back,” he said, his tone morphed into one of almost benevolence. “You see, the treatment…the chemo… It makes my feet and my hands tingle. It’s pins and needles, most of the time. I can barely feel the floor. Driving is the worst. My legs hurt, too. I actually gotta go get chemo. Tuesdays and Fridays.”

Olivia sent an alarmed look through the glass that Elliot easily decoded: they needed to find out if Paul had come driving; that could give them a license plate, a name, and possibly so much more. Elliot didn’t want her to get her hopes up. This didn’t seem like the kind of guy who slipped up and revealed clues recklessly. 

“You’re in pain right now,” she acknowledged, lowering her eyes for a moment. “I’m sorry.”

Paul furrowed his brow in what looked like an expression that mixed pain and resignation. “Yes. You see, Olivia… I believe I’m already being punished.”

His statement appeared to leave her at a loss for words and glued to her chair while he started to rehearse his departure, like she didn’t want to accept the end of the interview or his self-imposed penitence. “Then why come here?” she asked.

He chuckled with a wave of his hand as though it was strikingly obvious. “Because I wanted to tell  _ you _ .” He stood up with some difficulty, seeming to lose his balance a little at first, but then grounding himself on the table, gripping at it for support as he moved away from his chair. “I  _ will  _ tell you,” he promised. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

Olivia eventually stood as well, reluctantly, taking a step back when Paul unexpectedly walked towards her. Elliot balled his fists at the sudden proximity. “Tomorrow?” she mumbled.

The man smiled, like they were going to meet for coffee the next day, a pleasant meeting, not a cop taking a perp’s statement about his crimes. “Yes, tomorrow. You’ll be here, right?”

She nodded, a bit more vehemently than Elliot would have wanted her to, which made him fear for her, already overly concerned about the repercussions of her involvement in this case. “I’ll be here.”

Paul extended a hand towards her, and Elliot felt his face turn red at the prospect of this man even considering touching her. He was just offering his hand for her to shake, though. She didn’t take it. 

The old man withdrew the contact while his stare lingered on her for another second. “Tomorrow I’ll tell you about Betty.”

  
  
  


***

  
  
  


“He knows we can’t keep him,” Olivia said, distractedly playing with the pendant in her necklace between her thumb and index finger, presumably oblivious to Elliot’s unbreakable scrutiny. 

“You’re sure you don’t know this guy?” he asked, hands on his waist, worry pulsing in his forehead.

“Of course I’m sure, Elliot,” Olivia smiled with annoyance, then turned to the captain. “How did he get inside the building without an ID?”

“The desk sergeant said he didn’t have any on him but he knew your name and the unit you belonged to, and insisted he wanted to give you information about a crime,” Cragen reported. “He was thoroughly frisked. He wasn’t carrying any weapons, so officers brought him up.”

“And we can’t get a sample of his DNA, get his prints?” Elliot was impatient; he needed information, anything that could help him feel in control of this situation.

“As you know, he hasn’t given us enough for a warrant,” the captain replied pointedly. “He came in voluntarily, and since he’s not under arrest, he’s free to go as he pleases.”

Elliot sucked his lower lip into his mouth as he contained the urge to kick or punch something, limiting his movement to a short and fast shake of his head. “So we’re just gonna waste our time listening to this guy’s old stories? We don’t even know if they’re real.”

“I don’t know, Elliot,” Olivia said, her big, brown eyes zeroing in on him with purpose. “I think there’s something to it.”

Elliot nodded his disagreement, his glance shifting between her eyes as they held the power to dismantle his resistance, defuse his anger. “I think he’s just messing with you. And I’d like to know why  _ you _ . Don’t you think it’s weird he came in asking for you?”

“Yes, I do. And I know he’s messing with me. But still… I feel that there’s something worth pursuing, even if he’s in control of the situation, even if he doesn’t give us anything to start with.”

The three of them started a silent walk back from the interrogation rooms, each lost in their own thoughts, before Olivia spoke again, not a lot of hope showing as she asked questions out of due diligence. “Did you try to offer him something to drink to get his saliva or his prints?” 

“Yeah, he said he didn’t want anything,” Elliot sighed.

“Maybe if you offer something to him tomorrow,” Cragen suggested. “He might take it if it’s coming from you. If you bat your lashes right.”

Elliot directed an angry look at the back of Cragen’s head at the suggestion, disapproving as he was of the strategy of using Olivia as bait in any way, even when he knew it was the best, possibly the only course of action they had.

A uniform approached them as they entered the squadroom. “The suspect took a cab, sir. Here’s the license plate.”

“Thank you,” Cragen said. Before marching back to his office, he angled his head in Olivia’s direction, which the officer understood as an instruction to give the piece of paper he was offering to her.

“Thanks,” she said as the officer walked away and left her and Elliot alone. She looked down, put the piece of paper away in her drawer, and pretended to rearrange the items on her desk, which Elliot knew was an attempt to mask how deep her apprehension ran. “Do you think he’s really coming back tomorrow?” 

He walked to her slowly, stopping by her side. “Are you alright?”

She looked up at him, surprised and, if his reading was correct, a little embarrassed. She smiled to cover it up. “Of course. You think the old man scared me?”

“A little, yeah,” he lowered the pitch of his voice.

Olivia scoffed, her attempt to look unaffected falling flat. “Please.”

“Scared me, too,” Elliot insisted with a hand to her shoulder that sent her head darting toward his in surprise at the unexpected move: he knew that touching was something they usually treated as a last resort, especially now, but that was the very reason he used it to drive his point home. “You know you can talk to me, right?”

He noticed her effort to hide it as her breaths became relatively more shallow as opposed to the increased width of her stare. “I know,” she rushed to assure him before proceeding to play it down. “But it’s like you said, for all we know these are just stories he’s making up.”

“You know that’s not the scary part,” he followed her face with his when she turned away, standing only a couple of inches from her now and causing a shiver she wasn’t able to disguise. “I wanna know why he came here looking for you.”

She looked at him pointedly, challenging his closeness and his touch so as to show him her fearlessness, but he saw it when her glance dropped to his mouth for a split second. “So do I, but we have to be patient. It’s all a game to him.”

_ Talk about playing games _ , he thought to himself as he granted her silent request and withdrew his head, standing upright again. His hand stubbornly stayed on her shoulder for another moment, giving it a light squeeze before breaking contact entirely, his fingertips still tingling with electricity. “I just don’t like to see you playing it.”

She sighed, looking relieved after reacquiring the entirety of her personal space. “It’s not like we have another option right now. Unfortunately, he holds all the cards.”

That was precisely the problem. 


	3. Nostalgia

3 - NOSTALGIA

  
  
  


“Betty was my neighbor. She lived right next door, and she had a boyfriend who came over every night. I had to listen to her moan and scream while the headboard hit the wall right behind my own bed.”

“Did that make you mad?”

“Yes, at first. Then I started wondering what it would be like to be the one with her, making her scream like that, fucking her so hard the whole building had to know about it.”

“She didn’t go to the police?”

“I don’t know if she did. She never saw my face. After Jackie, I realized I couldn’t be that impulsive… At the very least, I needed to hide my face.” 

“Angela worked at this coffee shop I used to go to. I just wanted her to notice me, but she never did.”

“And so you stalked her?”

“Then there was Becky… She never even saw me coming.”

“After a while, I didn’t even know who they were. I would just get this urge…and go out, looking for the perfect opportunity.” 

“The way it made me feel… It gave me a thrill that nothing else did. It was like an addiction. I didn’t want to be like that, but I’ve learned a long time ago that there’s no changing who you truly are. So I made peace with it and went on with my life.”

“I wish I could tell you I felt bad afterwards. But I didn’t. I felt accomplished. Proud, even.”

He spoke like he was telling old war stories at the dinner table. He spoke like he missed those moments, like he wished he could relive them. He spoke like he was dictating his life’s work so an attentive writer could portray every detail as accurately as possible in his forthcoming memoir. 

In a way, that was exactly what those strange interviews felt like to Olivia. Like she was responsible for taking inventory of this man’s past glories and making sure they were remembered after his passing. So far, that was about the extent of what she was able to do about them. In her mind, she wanted those victims’ stories to at least be heard, known. She’d be their witness even if there was nothing else she could do for them. 

But then again, she was also witnessing  _ his  _ story, as much as she tried to escape it or remain immune to whatever trace of humanity he might still hold, buried under so many layers of unfathomable acts. 

“I never imagined myself getting married…but then I met Elise,” he told her at one point. “She was…just a good person, all around. Everything I wasn’t. But for some reason…she saw something in me. I’ll never know what it was. Oh, and she was so beautiful. Beautiful like you, Olivia. She was… Whenever I saw her, I just couldn’t keep from smiling.”

She could almost picture this beautiful woman who was all good, seeing a broken man she could fix. Blind to his deep-seated hatred of women. “Did she…know?” Olivia couldn’t help but ask, shying away from specifying what she was referring to for some reason, like she was helping him protect Elise. Like she was protecting  _ him _ . Keeping the secrets he was entrusting her with. 

He bit his thin lower lip with his slightly-yellowed teeth. “No. I did everything I could to keep it all from her. She knew there was a darkness inside of me, she tried her best to shed light upon it. But she didn’t know what it was.”

Olivia’s heart broke for Elise, for just how dark the darkness she was trying to brighten up with a single, flimsy candle was. She could taste some disappointment of her own as well, even though she didn’t understand the reason for it. “So you didn’t stop after you met her?” she asked, sounding pathetic to herself with the implied notion that falling in love would have fixed a rapist.

She knew better. She  _ should  _ know better.

His huge smile at her glitch of innocence made her feel like a stupid, little girl, and she had to look away. “There’s no such thing as a magic cure for this thing I have, Olivia. I was surprised I was even capable of loving someone like that. I was pleased with myself for it, too.”

She nodded her defeat, her glance slowly making its way back to him as she noted that he kept referring to his wife in the past tense. “What happened to her?”

“She died…five years ago. Cancer, too. I got to see it happening to her, and now, I get to experience it myself. Talk about karma, huh?”

Olivia wished her heart wouldn’t ache for this man, but it did. It saw no difference between his pain or anybody else’s, it had complete disregard for the fact that maybe he deserved it. Her heart only saw the pain, and ached with it nonetheless.

“You and Elise never had children?” she asked, and she could almost feel Elliot’s  _ what are you doing? _ radiating from the wall.

The old man shook his head vehemently. “No,” he stretched out his vowel sound to emphasize the negative. “I’m a bad man, Olivia. Maybe even a terrible man. I wouldn’t want to…pass it on. When I die, the world will be a tiny bit better than the day before.”

Olivia wasn’t surprised when it pierced her heart like the thickest, sharpest needle. A wicked adrenaline injection, bringing her worst fears back to life. “Do you really believe that? That evil can be…passed on?”

He chuckled while she asked herself why ask his opinion. “Oh yes. And good can be passed on, too. I’m sure you inherited a lot of good genes from  _ someone _ .” 

“I wonder who,” she found herself muttering inside an honest, surprisingly flattered laughter, and her inner voice of judgment told her that her own bad genes were making her laugh with a rapist and feel illegitimately validated by his opinion of her. She was drowning in contradiction. 

And then he would flood the grey room with black and white all over again, and his darkness would envelop her like a thick, suffocating coat of mold.

“Annie was our neighbor. I knew I shouldn’t mess with someone who lived so close, but I couldn’t help myself. I remember Elise telling me about what had happened to that poor girl, and knowing she had no idea that I had anything to do with it made me feel…like a  _ god _ .”

With her energy quite low after hearing about yet another victim she didn’t have enough information about to do anything tangible, but just enough information about for her stomach to reject any possible plans for lunch, Olivia walked out of the interrogation room. It was the third day of interviews with the man they only knew as  _ Paul _ . As expected, Elliot’s eyes were boring holes into her as she moved, so she avoided his stare and focused on Dr. George Huang’s instead. 

If it were up to Elliot, she knew Paul would be long gone, and she’d be sitting safely at her desk across from him, catching up on a pile of perfectly harmless paperwork. “I just don’t understand why we keep giving this guy what he wants,” he said the moment the door clicked closed.

Olivia turned to look at Paul through the glass. He sat there with his paper cup filled with water, his fingers around it, squeezing slightly, careful not to spill any of the contents. He groaned as he stretched out his legs under the table while Olivia felt her own muscles strained with the tension of it all. 

She knew Elliot had good reason to be worried, but his concern could be overwhelming, especially when it came along with his touch and the lowest registers of his voice – they were dangerously disarming when she already felt robbed of her basic defenses.  _ You know you can talk to me, right? _ His hand still weighed on her shoulder.

“What do you think?” she addressed Dr. Huang, walking past Elliot, his apprehension, and his remark. 

“He’s very collected,” Huang replied, his eyes never leaving the subject of his analysis. “He acts like he has everything under control, every step of the way. Except for his illness. That’s his only vulnerability.”

She nodded at the FBI psychiatrist, wondering if he was about to confirm – or deny – any of the other hypotheses going through her mind. What were the chances of some of those stories having been concocted solely to entertain her, play with her? “Do you think he’s making any of this up?” 

Huang started shaking his head before she even finished speaking. “Absolutely not. That’s probably the thing I’m most certain about. Maybe the names, the timeline, that kind of detail could be made up, but it just doesn’t seem to me like he’s lying. He doesn’t show any of the common indicators.”

“Maybe he’s just very good at lying,” Elliot countered, his chin tilted up challengingly as he crossed his arms.

Olivia sighed, her eyes rolling back impatiently. “What does he have to gain by lying?”

Elliot arched his eyebrow at her. “What does he have to gain by being here at all?”

He was right. Three days in and they were no closer to finding anything concrete about the man or the crimes he claimed to have committed. He was careful to only use first names for all the people he mentioned, and there was no guarantee that those were even real as Huang had just pointed out.

The only leverage they had been able to gather was a pair of chopsticks and a couple of plastic cups from the day before, when Olivia had made sure Paul stayed longer by ordering them chinese. Not that she had been able to swallow a lot more on top of the stories he was telling her – he hadn’t been able to eat much either, blaming it on the queasiness brought on by chemo. 

Olivia knew this was not the type of perp to overlook things. He knew they were getting his DNA and prints. If he had been able to rape so many women for so many years, flying under the radar, that meant he knew exactly what to avoid to make sure he wouldn’t get caught. Maybe he just knew for a fact that his DNA and his prints had never made it into the system. Maybe he was counting on that as he slathered those chopsticks with his spit and used all his fingers to play with the plastic cups while he only pretended to sip on the water. 

But as those were their only leads, Olivia chose to hang onto them for the time being, hoping that all the listening to crimes that she could do nothing about was somehow going to pay off. 

“You buying him lunch again today?” Elliot asked, the sarcasm pointedly poised as they followed Huang out into the hallway, an annoyed chuckle her only reaction to his implied criticism. 

Captain Cragen seemed eager for the psychiatrist’s evaluation when the three of them walked through the doors of the squad room. “So what do you make of our mystery guy and his desire to confess his sins to Olivia, Doc?”

Huang nodded with an enigmatic smile as all heads turned in his direction. “Whatever he has in mind, Olivia is the target for sure. He’s playing with her the whole time, the typical cat and mouse routine. It’s like everything he says has the purpose of getting a specific reaction from her.”

“It’s what I’ve been telling you…” Elliot muttered under his breath, loud enough for Olivia to hear it as she sat in her chair.

“But he’s telling the truth,” she pointed out, based on the doctor’s previous statement that her partner had heard just as well as she had.

“Yes,” Huang confirmed with a hand gesture. “I believe the experiences he’s talking about have really happened, and that this is the precise reason he’s so careful not to give any details that would allow us to identify anybody.”

Cragen snorted a dry chuckle. “What’s the point of confessing if he doesn’t want us to be able to do anything about it?”

“We just can’t keep wasting time on this guy,” Elliot shook his head as he sat on the edge of Olivia’s desk and rolled up his shirtsleeves, a rare occasion these days in which he was wearing a suit and a tie. He shrugged at her. “He’s not giving us anything.”

Olivia huffed, spinning her chair to face him. “Well, it’s not like we have any urgent matters to tend to, so I say we keep listening to him until he slips up and gives us something.”

“Well, that’s not exactly the case anymore,” Cragen intervened. “While you were entertaining our special guest, we were called in for a double homicide in Washington Heights. Fin and Munch are at the crime scene now, and I’m gonna need the two of you, too. And you, Doc.”

Olivia felt her stomach sink. She knew this was bound to happen sooner or later: an urgent case would come in and take precedence over her wild goose chase, but her gut told her to insist. “Captain…”

Cragen waved his hands and pursed his lips. “I’m sorry, Liv, I know you’re invested in this, but you gotta admit it’s not going anywhere.”

“Did Warner or forensics get back to us with anything on the prints or DNA?” she asked, desperately seeking the smallest justification to go on.

Elliot scoffed, looking way too satisfied. “Take a guess… His prints are not in the system. No word on the DNA yet.”

She ignored him once again. “Captain, let me at least take a last crack at him… I’ll tell him if he doesn’t give me anything concrete, I can’t continue working with him.”

Elliot stood up straight in a rushed move. “Let me go in with her this time.”

Olivia and Elliot both stared at Cragen with pleading expressions, each making their own silent request. 

“Do it,” the captain conceded, turning his stare from her to him. “But let’s change it up a little bit. Elliot, I want you there as well. Make it clear it’s his last chance.”

Seemed like  _ her  _ last chance, too.

  
  
  


***

  
  
  


“No lunch today?” Paul asked with a smirk that disappeared when Elliot walked in right behind Olivia, and she couldn’t help the smile at the fact that the latter had asked her the same question earlier. 

“You said you weren’t hungry,” she replied like nothing out of the ordinary was happening, dropping on the table a bag of chips and a soda can and deliberately disregarding the unwelcome feeling of safety granted by Elliot’s presence as it invaded her. “But I got you this in case you’ve changed your mind.”

“I haven’t,” Paul rasped, his eyes glued on Elliot, and she knew lunch was not what he was talking about. “Who the hell is he?”

Elliot grinned widely, that hint of sarcasm he loved hitting perps with. “We’ve met, don’t you remember?”

“This is my partner, Detective Stabler,” Olivia explained, diplomatically.

“I do remember, but I wish I didn’t.” His focus changed back to Olivia. “I don’t like him. I thought I made myself clear when I said I would only speak to you.”

She grinned to herself. “Oh, no, Paul. You’ve made yourself perfectly clear. The thing is, you haven’t really given us much to go on here.”

“What the hell? I’ve been telling you my whole life here. Everything I’ve done. You think that’s easy for me?” Olivia recognized his feigned outrage, but it still affected her more than she would have wanted to admit even to herself – for some reason, she didn’t like the idea of letting him down.

She scoffed to cover any outward signs of discomfort. “Something tells me you know very well that there’s nothing we can do about the crimes you’ve confessed to so far. They’re all well outside the statute of limitations and quite possibly outside of our jurisdiction, too.”

Elliot approached the table from the other side, leaning on the surface with splayed palms. “So you see… It’s starting to feel like you’re just wasting our time, and that makes us wonder if we should keep complying with your demands.”

“Olivia… I don’t like this guy,” Paul reiterated, and she was astounded by the intimacy he instilled into his words this time, like he knew her much longer than three days, like Elliot was the intruder here. She was dumbfounded by the fact that the offending notion didn’t seem so far-fetched. “Can you please ask him to go?”

“Well, what a coincidence,” Elliot quipped, banging on the table with his hand for effect as he kept his voice controlled. “I don’t like you either!”

With a deep breath of apparent resignation, Paul leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms, his head turned exclusively toward Olivia. “Is he always this annoying? Quite the short fuse, I gather. Pretty territorial, too, all ruffled feathers around you. Please tell me you’re not seeing him? ‘Cause I would have to say, Liv, this is not the guy for you.”

The next second, Elliot’s hands were curled around the collar of Paul’s shirt, pulling him from his laid back attitude. “You think you know her? You think you can call her  _ Liv  _ after three days of pointless chatting?”

“Elliot!” she hissed, and he immediately let go of the man, straightening out his shirt and giving him a pat on the shoulder with a wide smile, smoothing out his momentaneous outburst before turning away like nothing had happened. He started pacing around the far side of the room toward the barred window with his hands behind his back.

Paul coughed a couple of times, recomposing himself and fixing his posture in his chair. “Pointless, huh? Well, I was saving this one for last, Olivia, but since I don’t see you setting your partner straight, I’ll tell you something you won’t find pointless at all.”

Olivia smiled, eyeing her perp with a glimmer of doubt from where she still stood, immobile, next to the table on his right side. “Please, I’m ready.”

“But he has to leave. And I don’t want him watching from the other side of the window either. I know he’s been watching.”

“Sorry, pal,” Elliot pulled a chair for himself and sank down, mimicking Paul’s position with stretched out legs and crossed arms. “Not an option this time.”

Olivia hesitated, looking away as she felt Paul’s stare burning her. She pulled the other chair and sat next to Elliot, raising her head and crossing her arms to match both men’s stances. “Start giving me more than made-up first names from cases I can’t prosecute, and I’ll consider asking him to leave.”

She couldn’t do anything to hide the heat that colored her cheeks with something closely adjacent to panic as Paul clearly saw right through her and into the cracks in her resolve. In a delayed reaction, he straightened out his previously-disturbed collar patiently, letting his head hang forward and starting to very slowly and almost imperceptibly shake it. 

He hoisted his head upwards again, scratching absentmindedly at his chin. “Sorry,  _ Liv _ ,” he said, his eyes focusing on Elliot only momentarily, and Olivia saw from the corner of her eye as her partner smiled at the purposeful use of her nickname. “I understand your boss must be pressuring you, not to mention your partner going on and on like a broken record about how you need to be careful around me when, in fact, what he means is that you can’t take care of yourself.”

“You think you know everything about everyone, don’t you?” Elliot cut in, and Olivia knew by his tone that he was trying to be playful, like he was completely unaffected by Paul’s rushed yet remarkably observant analysis, but she also saw it in Paul’s expression that it had the opposite effect. It also didn’t do much for the impact the observation had when it landed on  _ her _ .  _ What he means is that you can’t take care of yourself _ . She knew she shouldn’t listen to it, but she did. 

Both men were smiling at each other, and while Olivia could feel the heat of Elliot’s anger burning just below the surface, she detected no distress whatsoever in Paul’s demeanor. 

The latter let his smile fade during the short path his glance took moving from Elliot to her. “As I was saying, I know that you’re under a lot of  _ pressure _ … But you know very well that I can walk out of here whenever I want and never come back again, and I think I already know you well enough to know that you’ll never stop wondering about the things I didn’t get to tell you.”

Olivia nodded, puckering her lips and letting her eyes wander about the room as she tried to conceal just how much she recognized his words to be the truth, hoping to gather as much calm and indifference as she could to glare at him again. “Is that what you wanna do? Just get up and leave?”

In an unexpected move, Paul let all the smugness and presumptuousness wash away from his face as he leaned in and took a hand to his chest. “Me? Of course not. Otherwise, why would I be here in the first place?”

“Then what  _ do  _ you want?” Elliot scowled at him, too impulsive and edgy in Olivia’s opinion. 

Paul answered Elliot’s question, but his eyes remained locked on Olivia, as though she’d been the one to ask. “I want to tell you everything, like I’ve been saying from the first moment I walked in here. But you need to understand that I have to do this at my own pace. And the only way I feel at ease to tell you these…horrible things about my past that I’m definitely not proud of…is if you’re the only one here listening to me. You make me forget I’m at a police station.” He paused, turning to Elliot. “You don’t look like a heartless, robotic cop.” 

Elliot laughed, turning his head in Olivia’s direction. “Can you believe this guy?” He stood up, not even waiting for her to return his stare. “Unfortunately, we can’t stay here any longer listening to your…stories. Us heartless, robotic cops need to go out and do heartless, robotic cop things, like investigating actual cases.”

Olivia heard the shuffle of his feet walking away and the door swinging on its hinges. “Detective?” Elliot called when she didn’t move an inch from her sitting position.

“I’ll stay a bit longer, El,” she informed him, still unmoving, using his nickname as a shortcut, a  _ trust me _ tucked in between the sounds. Upon his lack of an audible reaction, she turned to face him. “I’ll be right out. Paul says he has something important to tell me, so I’ll listen to it.” Her head spun to send Paul a warning look, then turned back to Elliot. “If it turns out to be another pointless story, then I’ll show him the door myself. I think it’s pretty clear that it’s his last chance to give us something we can actually use.”

Elliot didn’t reply, his face contorting in a look that mixed disappointment and worry. She knew he had meant to get her out of the room, not leave her alone in it, but it had backfired, because she hadn’t done what he’d expected of her.  _ What he means is that you can’t take care of yourself _ . After a brief staring contest, he admitted defeat and left without a word, but she knew she hadn’t heard the end of it.

For now, she just waited for the sound of the door closing, with a strong feeling she was doing the right thing despite her partner’s disapproval. “Okay, it’s just you and me again.”

“How do I know nobody’s there?” Paul asked, still perfectly collected, and not amused in the slightest.

After a moment’s hesitation, Olivia swallowed, standing up: she knew she was either all in or out of the room. She walked toward the glass and stood there, looking at her own image and contemplating her own reluctance, quickly disputed by determination. Her round, brown eyes stared back at her questioningly, sending chills up her spine as she saw something in there that she hadn’t noticed before: familiarity. She glanced at Paul, whose own brown eyes watched carefully for her next move. 

In that moment, it was clearer than ever to her that she  _ needed  _ to listen to whatever it was that he had to say.

When her hand wrapped around the bead chain, three quick, urgent knocks startled her, making her face tremble in the mirror before she pulled, bringing the blinds down. Next, she turned the handle, tilting the slats closed and blinding her to all apparent brown eyes and hidden blues. She could no longer see into her own stare and question her commitment to this. She turned to Paul, angling her face at him as her fingers also curled around the button that turned off the microphones. He nodded with approval. 

He watched her go back to her seat in front of him and only then reached for the soda can she had brought him. “I assume you don’t have any beer,” he chuckled.

“Nope,” she said, tilting up her chin, waiting. 

Paul placed his right hand’s index finger under the ring and his thumb on the tab, but his fingers lost their grip when he tried to lift the backside of the tab and he winced. “Stupid, tingly fingers.”

Olivia leaned in and wordlessly offered to open the can for him. He nodded a  _ thank you  _ and watched her opening it with ease before sliding it carefully back toward him, his eyebrows knit with what looked like disappointment in himself for his inability to carry out such a simple task. He inspected his fingers for cuts, but didn’t seem to find anything.

“It’s pathetic,” he said, moving his fingers as if trying to get them to work properly. “Watching life run out like this. You’d think death would just come and take you, not that you’d die a little bit every day, losing your ability to do the most ridiculously easy things.”

“And the ridiculously hard things as well, I imagine?” she asked, doing a commendable job of keeping her sympathy at bay, she noted. “I’m assuming a man who can’t open a soda can can’t rape a woman.”

For the first time, Paul seemed taken off guard. “That was uncalled for.”

Olivia grinned, shaking her head, thinking about how outrageous it sounded that he would be offended when called out about his physical inability to continue terrorizing women. Still, she softened her tone. “When were you diagnosed?”

She’d definitely stricken a chord; she could tell by the way his chin twitched as he spoke, his inability to completely relax while making an effort to lie back, and the irritation in his voice. “Three years ago, and why are you suddenly so interested in my health?”

“Just a simple way to estimate if I can actually try to get justice for any of your victims,” she replied, as detached as she could.

“Did my prints and DNA come back yet?” he shot back immediately, looking unfazed and eager to reacquire the upper hand. 

Elliot seemed to whisper into her ear:  _ his prints are not in the system _ . “No,” she lied, still hopeful for the DNA.

“I’m not in the system,” he stated arrogantly. “I told you, I never got caught.”

“Well, who knows…” she said.

It was his turn to shrug, taking a swig of his soda. “I’d be surprised if you found anything. Incriminating, I mean. ‘Cause, you know, there are other things you may find. Like you said,  _ who knows _ .”

“What is it you want to tell me about that I won’t find pointless?” she pushed, ignoring his teasing. She wanted to let him know she fully expected him to hold his end of the bargain after she’d made such an effort to keep anyone else from watching or listening to their conversation. 

The adamant request made him put his beverage down, sitting back in his chair and fidgeting to find the most comfortable position. “Sarah. I wanted to tell you about Sarah.”

The sibilant sound of that name echoed in her head, wheezing inside her ears and erupting goosebumps all across her skin. With a quick look down, she scrawled it on her legal pad, and even the scratching sound of the pen swirling against the paper seemed to carry hidden meanings.

She swallowed with a conscious effort. “Who was she?”

Paul paused for a second; he seemed to be bracing himself for something, too. “This beautiful girl who worked at the campus library.”

Olivia’s pen dropped from her hand when her fingers froze, as though she’d lost control of her hand. Her heart was thumping in her chest with such violence that she could almost feel her torso moving back and forth after each strike.

Her breathing was shallow, and when she spoke, the amount of air was barely enough for a whisper. “Go on.”

“I liked following her. Sometimes she went home really late, and I worried that something might happen to her, so I followed her from far away, just to make sure she got home safe.”

_ Safe _ . Olivia could taste bile in the back of her throat as a fine coat of warm tears covered her eyes against her will. “And…” 

“One night, she left the library even later than usual, after midnight. So I followed her but…that night…I wanted to do more than just watch her. I wanted to get close to her.”

Just as soon as a tear escaped her eye, she wiped it out, focusing to add some strength to her voice to urge him on, even though she knew what was coming. The next four words out of her mouth seemed to consume what was left of her energy. “What happened next?”

“I waited for the right opportunity… She was walking down this really empty street, so I blitzed her from behind, hit her in the head with a piece of wood I found and took her to this landing, below street level. It was the perfect spot.”

There was a knock on the door, but Olivia wouldn’t have heard it if it had been an explosion.

“Detective Benson,” Elliot’s voice rumbled, informing her the door was open and he was inside, but the sound was slow to reach her.

“ _ Benson _ ,” Paul repeated, his nostalgic smile making a triumphant comeback.

“Give me a minute,” she pleaded without even turning her head, just raising her hand defensively, exasperatedly in Elliot’s direction, while her request addressed both men. 

Elliot had no idea what he was stumbling into. He had no business trying to save her from what he didn’t even know about.

“I need you out here, Detective,” he raised his voice slightly.

“Elliot, please, I can handle this.”

“ _ Now _ , Detective.”

“You know what?” Paul’s smile widened with a tinge of annoyance as he pushed himself up from his chair into a standing position with surprising speed despite his painful grimace. “I’m going,” he panted, finding his balance to start walking away. “It’s the second time this guy comes in without an invitation. We had an agreement.”

“No!” Olivia’s voice broke and her legs faltered beneath her weight worse than the old man’s had as she stood up. “You can’t leave, we’re not done.”

“Oh, we’re done,” Paul smiled again, narrowing his eyes at her. “I’m sure you heard enough, too.”

“No!” she protested. “I’ll make him leave, just wait here, and I’ll talk to him and–”

Stopping just before Elliot, Paul turned his head towards Olivia, who approached the two men with hesitant steps. “He doesn’t understand what’s at stake, Olivia,” he said, his voice now calm. He faced Elliot again, eliciting a confused expression from him. “He doesn’t understand what this means to you. Can you move, Detective Stabler?”

Elliot sneered, taking a step into the room to clear the exit. “Anything to make you leave, sir.”

“Wait, Paul,” Olivia heard herself begging, and it was only when she heard them in her voice that she realized she had tears instantly spilling from her eyes. “Please, don’t go.”

“Olivia!” Elliot called, his voice distant, as though muffled by water. “What’s going on?”

Already outside, Paul turned to look at her one last time, a benevolent smile slowly emerging from his lips. “I was getting tired anyway. I need to take my pain meds.”

Her eyes widened with hope. “But you’ll come back tomorrow, right?”

The man just sighed before turning to leave. “Bye, Olivia.”

“Paul!” she called again, charging through the door, but Elliot’s hand wrapped around her arm and deterred her.

“Olivia!” he roared at her face, his voice seeping through her stupor this time and throwing her into the reality that he had made the most important revelation of her life leave.

“Let me go!” she yelled, immediately starting a physical struggle to free her arm. “I need to talk to him, you don’t understand!”

His voice raised while he tried to immobilize her. “He’s getting to you and you’re not seeing it! You’re just repeating what he said now! What don’t I understand? I understand what talking to this son of a bitch is doing to  _ you _ .”

“I guarantee, you don’t,” she said, but even through angry, clenched teeth, her voice still shuddered on its way out, her fragility blatant from the ease with which Elliot was able to restrain her, hugging her body with both arms. Her tears assaulted her again. Her voice broke inside the protection of his arms. “Why didn’t you trust me? I said I needed a minute.”

Elliot loosened his hold around her a little, seemingly affected by her tearful question. “That’s not why I pulled you out… Cragen wants us at the ME’s office right away for the new case,” he explained with hushed caution. “Are you alright? You look…pale.”

She looked up at him.  _ Anything to make you leave, sir. _ She tried her best to hate him while she desperately craved his comfort.  _ You look pale. _ She felt pale. His pale, blue eyes were asking a million questions she didn’t have the answers to. The answer to her biggest question had just walked out, and it was his fault.  _ What happened next? _

Before she realized what she was doing, Olivia had already sunk into him, the navy blue of his shirt so inviting, the heat of him as her cheek connected with his neck, the solid wall that bent to accommodate her as his arms softened to turn their grip into an embrace. From last resort, touching had quickly become a better language than English.

“What’s wrong?” he insisted, speaking into her hair. She felt his hand cupping the back of her head, the immediate relief frighteningly powerful as it spread warmth and chills along her body at the same time. “It’s okay. I told you this stuff was getting to you.” He squeezed her a bit tighter, and it made her feel a bit safer. “What did that bastard say to you? You’re shaking.” 

What had he said? It was lost in the haze of her mind. It was nothing specific, but it was everything. She struggled to fish for the words in the muddy waters flooding her mind, only one certainty remaining unharmed. 

She barricaded against Elliot’s chest so she could look into his eyes. “He raped my mother.


	4. Empty vessel

4 - EMPTY VESSEL

  
  
  


_ He raped my mother _ . Not  _ he’s my father _ , although the implication was painfully clear. Maybe that was all she was ready to put into words at this point, and Elliot was not about to be the one to push her.

“How can you be sure?” he asked, not because he doubted her, but because he wanted to understand how everything had changed so much in the mere minutes he’d left her alone with  _ Paul _ . 

“He knew details that…only she knew,” Olivia replied, her eyes still haunted. “Trust me; I know her statement by heart. I can recite it.”

“I know,” was all he could say in the time they had before pushing open the doors to the Medical Examiner’s office, his mind obsessing over the tape with her mother’s voice playing in Olivia’s head incessantly, mercilessly – the sound stuck inside her ears where she couldn’t reach to pull it out. “Cap said you wanted to see us,” he said as soon as they were inside the room, forcing himself back into the task at hand. “What do we got?” 

Melinda Warner straightened up from where she’d been leaning into a notepad, scribbling something down, and greeted them with a small nod as she approached the slabs where two bodies lay covered. “Cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head, both of them.”

“Any signs of sexual violence?” Olivia asked, even though Elliot estimated less than fifty percent of her attention was actually on the matter at hand, despite her efforts.

“Yes, the  _ male  _ was sodomized,” Melinda held up a bloody candlestick inside an evidence bag. “This seems to be the instrument our perp used.”

Elliot grimaced at the sight. “What about the female?” he asked with guarded anticipation.

“No signs of sexual trauma,” she replied with an arched eyebrow that seemed to agree with the detectives’ surprise. “It looks like the male was the real target of the sexual violence.”

“That’s not very common,” Olivia muttered. 

Elliot shrugged his uncertainty as theories started forming. “Maybe an ex-boyfriend, didn’t accept she was seeing someone new, wanted to show him she was his?”

“Maybe,” Olivia agreed, absentmindedly.

“I found puncture marks suggesting the perp injected the victims with something, probably a paralyzing agent. I’ll know what exactly when the tox screen comes back.”

Elliot was a bit annoyed that Melinda had summoned them before having all the results. “Great. Is that all you had for us?” 

Melinda’s focus changed to Olivia. “Actually, I wanted to see you about your other case.”

Olivia’s eyes lit up with such a complex combination of feelings that Elliot couldn’t decipher it. “You got a match on the DNA?” she thought out loud.

“Not in CODIS, no,” the doctor confirmed what they already knew, then her voice became softer. “But I decided to run it against the NYPD database.”

Elliot could see Olivia’s breathing becoming ragged. “He’s a match to me, isn’t he?” Still no  _ father _ . It must be a difficult word for her to get out. He didn’t blame her.

“Yes,” Melinda confirmed, pursing her lips with a sympathetic expression. 

Even though he knew Olivia had been expecting this, hearing the substantiation of her certainty out loud made her eyes water and the color leave her face. She nodded quickly, avoiding both of their stares. “Thanks, I…I need some air,” she said before bolting.

With a quick nod of goodbye to the ME, Elliot walked out as well and found her in the hallway. “Are you alright?”

“What do you think?” she scoffed through tears that she did her best to erase on the back of her hand.

He approached her, allowing a clearance of only a few inches so he could lower his voice and protect the information they’d just confirmed. “What are you planning to do? Are you gonna tell Cragen?”

“Do you think this changes anything?” she countered in a frustrated attempt to keep her voice down as well, the words coming out on top of one another while her hand nervously, unintentionally untidied her hair. “My mom’s case is too old to prosecute, just like all the other ones. And his DNA is not in CODIS, so we can’t even tie him to any other rapes, recent or not. Not to mention that even if he had been in CODIS, we obtained the DNA illegally, since there was never anything to get us closer to getting a warrant. Officially, there’s no case. There’s nothing to tell.”

“Take a breath,” Elliot demanded with a few slow breaths that he hoped she would mirror. She eventually did, raising her eyes and peering at him through the messy strands on her forehead, her eyes speaking of fears she wasn’t about to admit to having. “I think you should tell Cragen,” he whispered when he felt she would be able to register it.

“I’m not so sure,” she shook her head with pleading eyes, apparently oblivious to the fact that he would back her up whatever her decision was. “If I tell him, he’ll think I’m not being objective.”

His eyes flickered between hers as he smirked without smiling. “Are you?”

“That’s beside the point,” she said, her tone a confession as she let her head hang. “He’ll want me on leave or something. He’ll have me sit this one out, the new case. Maybe he can bring Dani Beck to stand in for me again.”

“Liv…” he reached for her arm, the name of her failed replacement stinging like an accusation – a name he’d been seeing more often than he would have liked, usually overlooked and forgotten on the small screen of his cell phone, buried in his pocket where he didn’t have to deal with it.

“I’m just kidding,” Olivia flinched with a forced smile, her legs igniting into instant movement. “Let’s go.”

The driver’s license pictures of the two victims were surrounded by crime scene photos in a morbid before-and-after configuration on the squad room board when Elliot and Olivia made it back, parking next to each other by her desk.

“Patricia and Geoffrey Hawthorne,” Munch reported. “She was forty-one, and he was forty-five years old. They were found in their own bed, after being killed in their own home, which is above the bar where they worked as waitress and bartender. From our interviews so far, we gathered that they were married and had no other family that anyone knew of, besides each other.”

“We searched anyway,” Fin added, “but didn’t come up with anything. Geoffrey’s parents died in Texas, where he was from, and Patricia’s mother apparently killed herself about ten years ago. Neither of them had siblings, and there’s no father in Patricia’s birth certificate.”

“Does anyone stand out as having a motive?” Cragen asked while Elliot stole a glance at Olivia’s direction in order to assess the damage that the empty father-related field in the victim’s birth certificate had on her – she didn’t even seem like she was listening though.

Fin shrugged with a sigh of frustration. “The people from the bar aren’t exactly talking. I think something’s going on there that has nothing to do with serving drinks.”

“The bar’s owner is trying to keep the murders under wraps and seems to be already looking for replacements for Patricia and Geoffrey,” Munch said. “Looks like the guy’s anxious to get back in business, and my guess is he’s not telling the candidates the reason the jobs are suddenly available.”

“The drugs are all we’ve got?” Cragen insisted. “Do we even know anything about who’s dealing and who they work for?”

“My guess is Geoffrey took care of the deals,” Fin replied.

“It makes sense, Captain,” Munch explained. “There must be something else keeping the bar going: it doesn’t seem to be the hottest place in the neighborhood. But the bouncer did say something about a few customers being way too interested in Patricia.”

“I think that’s definitely a factor,” Huang weighed in from where he’d been watching with his chin pinched between his thumb and index finger. “The violence of it all, the fact that the killer incapacitated both of them and only raped Geoffrey, possibly in front of Patricia. I think she’s relevant to the motive even if it’s drug-related.”

Olivia raised her eyes for the first time from where she sat, leaning against her desk. “Maybe Patricia was cheating with a customer? Is there any way to get to these people, talk to them to see if anyone knew them personally or had a motive?” she asked.

“Not with the bar closed as it is right now,” Fin countered.

Elliot sat immobile with his arms crossed. “Did anyone talk to the bar owner? Who is he, anyway?” 

“No,” Munch snickered. “His name is Alvin Hobbes, and he’s been very effectively avoiding us.”

Cragen shook his head. “We need to find out what’s going on in that place.”

  
  
  


***

  
  
  


With a long, exhausted sigh, Elliot lazily fished for the keys in his pocket. His cop instincts were too tired to notice her, so they gave him no fair warning before he looked up to find more than just his bare door standing there. “Dani? What are you doing here?”

Dani Beck cocked her head to the right with a sneer, her hands shoved deep into her faded blue hoodie’s pockets. It was almost as if Olivia had conjured her by mentioning her name earlier. “You haven’t been returning my calls, my texts. Why the silent treatment?”

He swallowed, his thumb and index finger clutching at the key he’d been looking forward to using, his hand and intention paused. “I just didn’t…want either of us to get confused.” 

“There’s nothing confusing about meeting for a drink or answering a booty call,” Dani laughed, biting her lower lip suggestively. 

That move had worked before, more than once, and all those times he had let her use him to numb whatever feelings she needed to numb, while he’d used her to forget about the fact that his divorce was now final, and that Kathy had decided to fight him on his request for joint custody of the kids. To forget about Olivia being gone, or being back but shutting him out. Their arguments. He had used Dani to smother his loneliness way too many times, but he had always known it to be nothing more than a temporary fix. 

He considered opening the door, but that would look like an invitation, and he wasn’t sure he was ready to make one. “I’m not the kinda guy to drag something like that along, I think you know that.”

Dani scoffed. “Isn’t that what you’ve been doing since that first night you kissed me? Dragging  _ this thing _ along?” She took a decisive step in his direction. “She’s back, isn’t she?” 

“Who?” he furrowed his brow to buy some time, but he knew  _ who _ . And she knew the answer.

“Olivia?” she exaggerated on the  _ O  _ and  _ L  _ sounds and the rising intonation at the end, her eyes piercing his. “Is that why you’re ignoring me?”

“I’ve been busy, that’s all,” he shook his head, raising a hand in surrender.

“You busy tonight?” she put a hand to his shoulder. “I mean…I’m already here.”

Elliot smiled in defeat, finally moving his stationary, key-holding hand toward the lock.

  
  
  
  


***

  
  
  


The next day came, and Paul didn’t. Olivia had barely slept, worrying about whether he would show up or not and trying to figure out what to do if he didn’t, because part of her had known he’d been serious about his goodbye. She camouflaged her waiting as she participated but dedicated no attention to the early Friday morning workings on the double-murder case, and once her watch made it past the time Paul had originally arrived on Tuesday, she slipped out of the bullpen with a plan, taking advantage of Elliot’s distraction after arriving a half hour late this morning.

Determined to find the old man whose real name she didn’t know yet, Olivia took the license plate number of the cab he had left in after their first interview to TARU and had Ruben Morales help her pull the traffic cam images of that day to follow its path. It turned out the taxi had dropped him off at an oncology clinic not that far away, and she figured that was probably where he underwent chemotherapy.  _ Tuesdays and Fridays _ , he’d said, and her hope was that he’d be at the same place at around the same time today. 

She thanked Morales for his work, which she had warned him beforehand hadn’t exactly been sanctioned by the Captain, and left. She texted Elliot as she walked to her car, wondering if he had already noticed her absence – of course he had, she determined when she saw five missed calls from him on the screen. 

_ I need to run an errand. Can you cover for me? _

Olivia flipped her phone shut and didn’t wait for a reply. 

When she arrived at the clinic, she refrained from flashing her badge at the reception desk, well aware that no one would divulge the clinic’s patient list without a warrant. Instead, she asked where the chemotherapy area was located, claiming she was supposed to meet her father there – not exactly a lie, she thought. 

She approached the glass doors cautiously, taking in the room’s layout: several armchairs were placed side by side, forming a circle around the room, most of them taken by people hooked up to IVs, reading books or magazines as different types and colors of medicine dripped from IV bags into their bloodstream. 

Inspecting all chairs at a glance, she didn’t recognize anyone. A few women with their heads covered exchanged looks with her, and she did her best not to eye them with pity. 

Olivia noticed a corner where each patient’s chart was hanging from a hook on the wall, distributed following the order of the patients seated in their chairs. She ran her eyes over the names, not recognizing anyone – not that she even knew the name she was supposed to be searching for. 

Leaving the room, she saw a corridor with several doors for smaller rooms on both sides. On the outside of each door, there was a chart with a patient name as well. The doors weren’t closed, and she was able to see that each of those small rooms contained one of those armchairs, a tv hanging from the wall and a chair for anyone accompanying the patient. Olivia saw those chairs filled in several rooms, but empty in others. 

The door to one of the last few rooms was only cracked open, but something about the outstretched legs she saw through that narrow slit was instantly recognizable to her. Before he could notice her, she grabbed his chart from the hook on the door to check the information. 

The name field was filled in with  _ Edward Paul Morrison _ . The line below listed his condition as  _ Multiple Myeloma _ , and the one below that specified the medication he was receiving,  _ bortezomib _ . She committed it all to memory for posterior research while she hung the chart back as quietly as she could. As soon as she pushed the door open, however, his voice hit her square in the chest. 

“Did you have trouble finding the place?” he turned his head with a smile as he kept his medicated arm still where it lay on the chair. “I’m nearly done. You almost missed me.”

Olivia chuckled. “Of course you knew I was coming, you know everything.”

“And now so do you, don’t you?” He tilted his head towards the chair, motioning for her to take a seat next to him. 

Her body hesitated, but her voice didn’t. “Yes,  _ Paul _ , I know everything,” she rasped, then quickly corrected herself after purposefully getting his name wrong. “I’m sorry, I meant to say  _ Edward _ , isn’t that right?”

“That’s right,”  _ Edward _ nodded impatiently, waving at the empty chair once again with his free hand. “Just come sit, will ya? My neck hurts from turning to look at you all the way over there.”

Overlooking a thought that said she shouldn’t care whether his neck hurt, Olivia silently granted his request, noting that his IV bag was still half full, contrary to his statement that she had nearly missed him. “It almost sounds like you were anxiously waiting for me,” she teased.

“I wouldn’t say anxiously,” he snickered.

Olivia smiled – it wasn’t planned. Nothing was. “So you admit you were waiting.”

“As were you this morning, I assume, back at the precinct, wondering if I’d show up,” he challenged smugly, but she didn’t mind, amused that he just couldn’t admit to something unless she did the same.

“Why didn’t you?” she asked wholeheartedly, realizing she’d never had a plan on what to say to him once she found him, realizing he had a power to just get the truth out of her. She genuinely wanted the truth back. “To torture me? To punish me for letting Elliot interrupt us?”

Edward’s only answer was a smile. “You know, this is the first time I’ve had company since I started treatment.”

She noticed her voice slipped out sweeter than at all intended. “How come you don’t sit outside with everyone?”

“My case is bad enough that I get to be alone,” he explained. “Too fragile to be around other sick people. You know, this medicine kills your immune system.”

She felt for him and hated herself for it. “Three years you’ve been in treatment?”

He nodded with big but slow movements as his eyes fixated on the muted tv. “Yes. Three long years.”

Olivia waited for his glance to ricochet back at her. “Is it working?”

“Not really,” he smiled sadly. “Just delaying death, and not even by that much.”

A tear threatened to prickle from her left eye, but she held onto it. “So why do it?”

Edward nodded once. “I think about that a lot. I don’t know. I guess as bad as it is… I just don’t wanna die.”

Silence hung heavy in the air, and Olivia could hear the dripping sound of the IV ticking seconds away from their lives as they both looked at the tv and watched a cheerful man mixing something in a bowl for a recipe. She could make out a few words from reading the man’s lips.

“Edward,” she called when the quietness became unbearable, the intentional, conscious effort to snatch out truths from his insides with the use of his real name scratching at her throat while he slowly turned to face her again. “Will you finish telling me about my mother?”

For a moment, sadness colored his eyes in a way she’d never seen before, but she didn’t rule out the possibility that she made it up in her head with the help of the offending, immune-system-killing medicine entering his body before her eyes. Maybe she just secretly wanted him to feel something too badly, badly enough to see remorse where it didn’t belong. 

“I told you everything,” were his possibly-merciful words. “You don’t need more details than that swimming in your head.”

She meant to convince him, but her reply sounded like a question. “Maybe I do.” Maybe she just needed him to remind her he was her mother’s rapist, not her father. She had no father.

He tipped his head sideways, the expression on his face looking a lot like a kind father’s, not that either of them knew what a father actually looked like. “Now who’s torturing you?”

Olivia smiled, and so did he, but she had to look away before her yearning heart tried to read feelings between blurred lines. Her empty vessel was anxious to fill with anything, but that didn’t make the contents he was offering worth it.

A more pressing matter presented itself as she recalled Tuesday morning and his demand to see her. “How did you find me?” She knew he hadn’t read about her in the paper. Her name hadn’t stuck with him.

The truth emerged more easily than she’d expected. “I kept tabs on your mother… on all of my girls really.”

_ My girls _ . Not even the IV drip could blacken  _ that  _ truth out.

It was time for another one. “Then you must know that…”

“That I’m your father?” he finished matter-of-factly, and she barely had time to wrestle between the blasphemy of the f-word and the uninvited pain of his apparent indifference.

“Mr. Morrison, I think we’re done for the day,” said a foreign, cheerful voice invading the small room and removing Olivia from the trance induced by the offending word.

_ Father _ . She was only partially aware of the nurse checking on the IV bag, asking  _ Edward Paul _ how he was feeling, removing the needle from his arm and helping him roll down his sleeve.

“I see you have company today,” exclaimed the blond-haired, innocent-eyed nurse, who couldn’t be older than twenty-five. Her obvious ignorance about who the man she was treating so kindly was sent a shiver throughout Olivia’s body. 

“Oh yes, Nancy,” said Edward, turning to Olivia with an affectionate, maybe even proud smile. “This beautiful young lady is my  _ daughter _ .”

“Really? You never mentioned you had a daughter,” said the young nurse, turning to Olivia with the biggest grin across her face. “I can see it! You have the same eyes! I’m so glad you could make it, I can tell your company made a huge difference to your father today.”

Olivia was speechless, watching the words father and daughter thrown at her like daggers, killing her with kindness while she agonized with the overwhelming, hateful truth.  _ You have the same eyes. _

“Oh, Olivia is very busy,” Edward spoke in her place, attracting the nurse’s curious look as she helped him stand up. “She’s a cop! She catches bad guys. The  _ worst  _ kinds of criminals.”

He eyed her with encoded innuendo as his voice continued to play his part. Olivia stood up as well and accepted Edward’s hand that the nurse offered to her when she was done helping him up. 

“You’ll take me home, right, sweetheart?” he said, his fingers curling tightly around hers.

She knew everything now, which gave her clearance to know even more, so she was entrusted with Edward’s address and with the task of driving him to his one-bedroom apartment. In the elevator, she regretted checking her phone and seeing more missed calls from Elliot: guilt immediately seared her. For disappearing, for not telling him what she was doing, for not knowing the exact reason she was keeping him out of this.

The place was quite small: the front door faced the kitchen, which was narrow like a hallway, only allowing for furniture and appliances on the left side so that the right side could accommodate movement. To the right, there was a small bathroom, the tiles tinged in recent, yellow paint. Further down the small hallway was the bedroom, only big enough for a bed and a medium-sized wardrobe. On the other extremity of the apartment, there was a living room the same size as the bedroom, containing only basic items of furniture and a little hint of personality – a few paintings on the wall, half a dozen items on a shelf, and a carefully arranged liquor cart with several half-full bottles and various types of miniature glasses.

“I stole those,” Edward informed her as he sunk into a comfortable-looking armchair, visible fatigue taking over his features. Olivia looked at the small version of a wine glass that she held in her hand. “I guess you can add a little kleptomania to my list of sins.”

“Seriously?” escaped her mouth with a snorted laugh, the first word out of her since they’d left the clinic. It even came out a little hoarse. She self-consciously cleared her throat.

“Yeah, I like salt and pepper shakers, too, but the glasses were my latest obsession,” he explained. “Did you wanna keep that one?”

“Keep it?” Olivia mumbled as her eyes shifted from the small glass to his eyes and back.

“Yeah, I can tell you like it. I can tell you like wine, too. You can have some, if you want, I keep it in the kitchen.”

How could he tell what she liked or didn’t like? Was it some sort of genetic bond that ensured this inexplicable intuition about someone you’ve one way or another brought into the world? Maybe wine, as opposed to her mother’s vodka, was a taste that came from him, she realized as she once again confronted the fact that this was  _ her father _ , the other half of her that she had always wondered about. Maybe the wine, the brown eyes, and all the other inexplicable quirks came from him. Everything bad about her that she couldn’t bring herself to blame her mother for.

“I shouldn’t keep it…” she managed, her fingers inextricably wrapped around the small goblet.

“Nonsense!” he laughed. “It’s yours.”

He looked at her like he was waiting for her to confirm she accepted the gift, so she raised the little glass as if she were toasting. “Thanks, I really do like it.”

_ I stole those _ . Maybe stealing from the thief made it okay, and two wrongs could make all of this alright. She put away the miniature glass and her mixed feelings.

“What about that wine?” he asked. “Do fix me a drink while you’re at it, would ya?”

“I can’t drink,” Olivia chuckled. “I need to go back to work. What are you having?”

“Scotch, neat, thank you, dear,” he said with a grimace of pain as he used one foot to free the other from his shoe. “Why do you need to go back? Is  _ Elliot  _ waiting for you?”

She smiled at his emphasis on Elliot’s name, realizing their mutual dislike for one another was amusing for some reason. Still, she didn’t want to encourage it even further.

“They all are, I kind of disappeared to go see you,” she amended, pouring the drink into a normal-sized tumbler she found on the cart, then walking toward the old man. Like in the clinic, there was a chair next to his armchair, as if he’d been expecting company. Maybe he had. She handed him the glass without taking a seat. “Here you go.”

“Thank you, dear, thank you,” he said in a rush, taking the glass to his lips as if it were the last drop of liquid in the desert. 

Olivia spotted the picture of a dark-haired, green-eyed woman standing against a railing, glittery blue water behind her as her hair blew with the wind, her fingers trying to keep the strands from covering her face completely, her smile looking genuine as she laughed at her inability to resist nature’s movement. 

Maybe that’s how Olivia felt, drawn here to this man, this horrible man. Nature’s movement. Anything to deny her agency in it.

She walked to the shelf and took the frame in her hand. “Is this Elise?”

“Oh, yes,” he confirmed, wistful. “That’s my Elise. Beautiful, wasn’t she?”

“She was,” Olivia replied, a part of her wishing that person he talked so fondly about was her mother, that he had loved her, not violated her. That he had adored her and photographed her as she smiled, her body and her soul still pure, unharmed, cheerful hair hiding a cheerful, sober smile. She struggled to keep the tears at bay, putting the frame back and trying to snap out of it. “I should get going,” she said, only turning to face him when she had her features satisfyingly under control.

“So soon?” Edward protested with a small smile. “Well, at least now you know where to find me.”

Without any other goodbyes, Olivia left, trying to decide if knowing where to find him was a good thing. While she found no answer, she did impulsively decide to leave her card next to his keys on the shelf.

Now he could find her, too.

  
  
  


***

  
  


“Glad that you decided to show up,” said Cragen, his voice coming from behind her as she tried to inconspicuously make her way out of the elevator and into the squad room.

Olivia turned, pursing her lips with guilt. “I’m sorry, Captain,” she shrugged. “I had something to take care of.”

“I’m not sure I wanna know what you’re up to,” he jabbed. “What I need is for you to step into my office right now, we’ve been waiting for you.”

Alarmed, she followed Cragen into his office through the side door, surprised to find Elliot and Huang already in there. “Hi,” she said, hesitant, her stare not lingering on Elliot’s for too long as it held a million questions and statements – they’d have time for those. “What’s going on?” she asked, going from one face to the next for clues.

“We seem to have hit a wall with our case,” the captain explained. “It doesn’t sound like Patricia and Geoffrey knew many people outside of the bar’s staff, but the people there are not talking.”

“The evidence doesn’t point to anyone either,” Elliot added from where he sat, leaning back against the chair. “Hell, there  _ is _ no evidence. We’re stuck.”

“We don’t have anyone with a motive yet?” she asked. “The crime was pretty violent, it doesn’t seem random at all.”

“Oh, it’s not,” Dr. Huang smiled crookedly. “There’s a lot we don’t understand about the murders. It definitely looks personal, because the killer took his time to torture the victims before killing them.”

She turned to Elliot again. “Where are we on the drug angle?”

“Nowhere, as you may have heard me say from the beginning,” Cragen grated, clearly annoyed. “We haven’t made any progress today. We need someone on the inside to see what the hell is going on at that bar. That’s where  _ you _ come in.”

“Oh,” Olivia said. “Someone inside? You mean…undercover?”

“The bar owner is desperately looking for replacements for Patricia and Geoffrey,” Elliot shrugged, like he’d been cornered into this just as much as she was about to be.

“A couple with experience working at a bar together might be just what they need,” Huang complemented. “Plus, no one there saw either of you, they were only questioned by Fin and Munch.”

Olivia nodded slowly. “Okay, so…”

“We got you and Elliot an interview with the bar owner tonight,” Cragen informed her. “Which is the first real contact we’ll get to make with him, as he’s been refusing to cooperate. Huang is gonna work with you both on your profiles.”

Elliot stood up and walked to Olivia with a playful half-smile. “I’m gonna be Rob. Are you ready to become Susie?”

  
  



	5. Vulnerable

5 - VULNERABLE

  
  
  


Elliot released a nervous breath while he waited, grabbing hold of another when he heard her heels clicking closer on their path from the locker room to the lounge.

He was sitting on the couch when Olivia walked in, self-consciously pulling at the hem of her short jeans skirt, her legs bare but for the fishnet stockings that squeezed her skin rather uncomfortably. While a bit looser, her top didn’t leave much to the imagination either, with a deep V neckline that gave away a lot more cleavage than she was usually comfortable showing at the precinct. Her loose hair cascaded over her shoulders and framed her face, which donned heavy makeup that greatly flattered her eyes.

Her big, round, brown eyes.

“Liv,” hoarsely escaped his lips before he could vet it as he stood up. 

Her outfit was tight and revealing in all the right places, but it was still wrong to look, no matter how dry the sight had the power to make his mouth. 

“It’s  _ Susie _ ,” she corrected him with a cautious smile, but it almost sounded like permission. 

In reality, she was distracted taking in the tight grey t-shirt that she could see wrapped closely around his chest and abdomen, even as it was mostly covered by a brown, rugged leather jacket and the dark jeans that hugged his muscular thighs a bit more than she would have expected. 

She swallowed, determined to play it all down – the way she was looking at him, the way he was gazing at her, how it all sent her heart racing. “It’s amazing, all you need to do to go undercover is wear some jeans and a leather jacket.”

“The visual focus will be on  _ you _ ,” he explained, taking a few steps forward and letting his eyes roam her body just for a second to drive his point home. “You look…” 

His adjective never saw the dim light of the empty room, hanging invisible in the air instead. As if choreographed, both peered downward above the mezzanine railing, noticing that in addition to less lights turned on downstairs, there were also less people walking through the bullpen as night fell in a rush outside. 

“The ad does mention good looks for the waitress,” Olivia said only to fill the silence. “But it’s weird that it said married couples are welcome.”

Elliot’s brow furrowed as he gulped at  _ married couples _ and all the implications from his previous life as a married man, his current life as someone who used sex as a painkiller, and his imagined life with Olivia – with  _ Susie  _ –, which was about to begin. His thumb played with the golden ring adorning the void he’d grown used to around his finger, his glance matching the piece of metal to its counterpart in Olivia’s tightly-fisted left hand.

He caught a whiff of her scent from his closeness, the intoxicating mixture of her with a sweet, slightly citric fragrance, something too girly for her on any given day but that in a weird way suited her tonight. 

Susie suited her tonight. 

Elliot’s body had no interest in his mind’s confliction, and he had to fight the physical reactions as his eyes strayed down her body in ways that his shouldn’t, but Rob’s _ could _ . 

Rob’s freedom to want her suited him tonight.

He kept his voice guarded. “I guess we’re about to find out the reason for that preference, but it really looks like they want the perfect replacement for Geoff and Patricia.”

He was just a man lusting for his wife. It was the role he was expected by everyone to play.

The small space between them had Olivia’s heart hammering in her chest. She took a breath, trying to rein it in and starting to move away, fighting the magnetic pull of him before it was too late. “Should we get going?”

“Hey, wait…” Elliot’s fingers curled around her arm, an impulse that could not be tamed in time: he  _ needed  _ to touch her. Well,  _ Rob  _ needed to, he reminded himself. That made it acceptable. “You can’t walk away from me like this.”

Elliot’s other hand wrapped around the dip of her waist, then slid to rest on the small of her back as he pulled her to him, the sudden and firm nature of the movement making her stumble on her own foot and forcing her to brace her forearms against his chest for balance, her hands splayed on his shoulders. His fingers released her upper arm and curled in a loose fist that skimmed her arm all the way up, running along her shoulder and collarbone, unfurling and cupping her neck, his fingertips rooting themselves into the hair on her nape while his thumb traced the shell of her ear. 

He sucked in a sharp breath when she shuddered. They were just acting.

Olivia witnessed it all, unmoving, afraid to disturb the scene she still didn’t know how to participate in. “What are you d-doing?” she exhaled through shallow breaths. 

“ _ This _ is a problem,” he said, his voice causing shivers to slowly crawl up her spine. “If we’re going to pass as a couple, we can’t be this nervous touching each other.”

_ Nervous _ . Neither of them could believe he was actually acknowledging it, but then again, they also couldn’t believe the way they were holding each other right now. But he was right; they both knew. In the brief conversation he’d had over the phone with Alvin Hobbes to set up details about the interview, it had come up that the previous bartender-waitress duo had made it a habit to give the customers a free show that they’d come to expect and enjoy. 

Touching each other naturally – and frequently – was a requirement.

“I know,” was Olivia’s delayed response. Her voice became a shaky breath when she saw his eyes dramatically drop to her lips. “You’re right.”

She reciprocated, her gaze thoroughly outlining his lips and the five o’clock shadow around them that also covered his broad, square jaw. She swallowed dryness as she forced her eyes up again to find his. 

“So, your… _ errand _ this morning,” he asked. “Did you see Paul?” 

He’d been holding back the question ever since she’d gotten back to the station, unaware of whether she had changed her mind about telling Cragen or anyone else about her discovery. He brought it up now in an attempt to fit dialogue into this earth-shattering exchange, to pretend the real-life repercussions of this role-play game didn’t exist, but he also needed to know. Somehow, she seemed vulnerable enough to give it to him straight.

Maybe talking would help them get used to their bellies shoved flush against one another, their hands clutching at each other’s bodies, their fingers moving slowly in indefinite patterns against each other’s skin, even through a thin layer of fabric. 

Maybe it would help them reconcile how natural it felt already.

It might even ease the tightness that had grown in Elliot’s chest from the moment the old man had said Olivia’s name for the first time.

The question threw her off-balance, the feelings stirred up by it almost more dangerous to her now than the ones hovering in the stillness between them – they were certainly more foreign. She was used to her conflicted feelings for Elliot, although maybe not used to grappling with them so upfront, but she wasn’t at all used to having encounters with a father figure to mull over, understand, and report. 

She would have told Elliot anything then if she had known how to describe it.

“Yeah, I saw him,” was all she said, her eyes telling him that whatever this was, it already ran deeper than he could imagine, maybe than  _ she  _ could imagine. 

She leaned further into him, caught in the small space where their magnetism reversed, kept them together instead of safely apart. She usually did everything she could to run in the opposite direction, but the unknown feelings she needed to escape this time had to be outweighed by an equally powerful force that had to be him. 

She didn’t know if that was the reason, but she was suddenly overwhelmed by a completely different type of need: she wanted so badly to kiss him.

“There’s something else,” she said, her eyes tentatively touching his lips, carrying the weight of her intentions.

He should have known this was going to follow. Maybe he  _ had _ . “I know,” he assured her, deliberately looking at her mouth now.

Her eyes grew wide against his pools of blue, and her voice dropped to a whisper as she put the tension between them into words. “They’ll expect us to kiss, and they’ll expect for it not to look like it’s the first time.”

_ The first time _ .

Elliot cleared his throat, his Adam’s apple bobbing impatiently. “Yes,” he whispered back, their surroundings and quite possibly everything else instantly forgotten. 

He hadn’t known she could have this power to silence his mind. The warmth of her skin rendered his questions and worries irrelevant. He wondered just how much more she could do with her lips latched onto his.

They stared at each other for what felt like forever before Olivia inspected their surroundings for any bystanders, finding none before she was forced to face him again. His eyes wouldn’t allow hers to wander for too long. 

Her lips tingled with anticipation. She licked them once, then reprimanded herself.

Was this really going to happen, just like that? After nine years? Well, it was just an undercover operation. It wasn’t really  _ them _ . But still. The reality and the importance of it hit Olivia with full force then, panic making a breath-taking appearance as she realized the flaw in her play: masking a vulnerability with another.

They closed the gap one millimeter at a time, a give and take of distance as they covered such short ground in a torturously-slow fashion that felt like a hundred-miles-per-hour speed. Elliot’s mouth made the first move, brushing against Olivia’s. Hers responded, leaning into the touch. They lingered in that moment: there would never be another first time.

Their lips connected, and they revelled in the sensation for a second before the exchange became a bit less hesitant, a bit more eager. 

Olivia’s lips parted of their own accord, and Elliot didn’t need any additional invitation to slide his tongue between them. The moment it touched hers, she felt an instant, aching need pulling from her core and sending her heart into an even more erratic beating pattern. The accompanying sound that escaped from the back of her throat encouraged him, and heat enveloped her as he tightened his arms around her, deepening the kiss even more, releasing a groan of his own that caused her fingers to curl around his jacket’s collar to pull him closer.

When it felt like they’d been kissing for a little longer than necessary – not that any of this had any known parameters – Elliot felt the need to pull away, leaving behind one last, light pull of her lower lip, reluctant to break contact. Their foreheads leaned on each other, both pairs of eyes still closed, before Olivia moved to rest her head on his shoulder, easing herself into a fairly less dangerous hug.

They listened to each other’s breaths and their own hearts slowing down. 

“His real name’s Edward,” she revealed, more confident now to talk about this, the words coming out without effort under Elliot’s protection, sheltered by their perfect alibi and the way the world hadn’t exploded because they had kissed. Feeling stronger about one vulnerability seemed to help with the other. “ _ Edward Paul _ , so technically not entirely a lie.”

Elliot needed a minute to come down from the high of the kiss and remember what she was talking about before he could respond. His fingers were still buried in her hair, and they now stroked the skin of her scalp softly, a red flag raising in his brain as he made the connection between the name and who it alluded to. “Where did you find him?”

“At a clinic for oncology treatment,” she replied, slipping her hands underneath his jacket for better access: being a layer closer to his skin made her feel safer. “He was expecting me.”

“Son of a bitch,” Elliot muttered, the hand he still had on the small of her back finding a breach between her skirt and her top. She didn’t object in any way when it slid into direct touch with her skin – if anything, she trembled slightly, burrowing deeper into his neck in response. 

Her voice was small, but she kept talking, because every forbidden thought she exposed to him made her feel a little lighter. “I took him home afterwards. I know where he lives now.”

Elliot sank his fingers into the softness of her back as his own body tensed up with rage-tinged worry. While he recognized and welcomed the weight, physical and otherwise, that she was laying upon him as she relaxed a bit more and gave him another piece of the truth, he struggled to keep his cool upon learning she’d put herself at risk like that. “Why didn’t you call me? You shouldn’t have gone with him alone.”

Edward’s voice echoed in Olivia’s head.  _ What he means is that you can’t take care of yourself. _ Maybe that was part of the reason she hadn’t wanted Elliot there, but now, surrounded by him, it was difficult to think of any scenario in which she wouldn’t want him with her. She wanted him to know now. She needed to share this with him.

“I can handle myself,” she murmured, quite unconvincingly. 

She was thankful when she felt the air passing through him as he huffed with frustration and let her answer slide with clear difficulty. He was afraid that she might be starting to see this guy as her  _ father _ out of the pure need to fill that void, but he knew lecturing her about it would just be reason for her to keep things from him again in the future. 

“What did he say?” he prodded further. “He tell you more about your mother?”

Her breath was warm against his neck when she sighed, the brush of her lips on his skin resembling a kiss that, in that moment, she felt entitled to somehow, but still she held back. “He said I don’t need the details in my head.”

“So thoughtful all of a sudden,” Elliot grinned through clenched teeth, grazing her forehead with his lips.

Olivia’s grip around his middle tightened, and her voice lowered. “His treatment’s not working. He’s getting weaker and weaker. He could barely walk after the chemo.”

Elliot noticed the worry in her voice. The heartbreak. Could she really be fearing for this man? She pulled away so they could look at each other, and he witnessed it in her watering eyes. 

“I’m trying not to feel anything,” she confessed, her whisper choked with the tears she was trying so hard to hold inside. Maybe if she said it quietly enough, it wouldn’t sound so bad. “Am I a horrible person?”

“No,” Elliot grated. “It’s the opposite. He doesn’t deserve it, but you’re too good not to care.”

“I don’t want to,” Olivia pleaded, a tear finally making it down her left cheek. How could he forgive her for giving a shit about this monster? She certainly couldn’t.

The finger he had on her earlobe slid across her cheek to wipe the moisture, staying longer to trace her cheekbone, then her jawline. “I know,” he nodded.

With all the unexpected naturality in the world, he leaned into her, and her lips once again received his. Was this still preparation for going undercover? Was it him comforting her? Kissing away her tears? Moving on its own, one of her hands slid around his torso and up his chest and neck until it cupped the back of his head, pulling him even closer. 

“El,” she moaned when he pulled back into reality, heat coursing through him upon hearing his name spoken like that. 

He wanted to make her say it again. 

“It’s  _ Rob _ ,” he corrected, the same way she’d corrected him before. 

They needed to keep each other in check.

But that was also the explanation to all this, Olivia figured. In Susie and Rob’s world, this – whatever it was – was allowed, encouraged. Required. Maybe Susie could help Olivia confess to everything she hid. Maybe Rob would listen and not relay her sins to Elliot. 

Maybe he could kiss her wounds better without anybody knowing about it.

“Thanks then, Rob,” she acknowledged.

Their bodies slowly, reluctantly disentangled, their gazes escaping each other, and a moment later they heard their names – their  _ real names _ , coming in the captain’s voice from downstairs. 

It was time to go. 

  
  
  


***

  
  
  


Susie slipped onto Olivia quite easily, no doubt with the help of Elliot’s quickly non-stranger hands: they still burned on her forty minutes later. The taste of his lips also echoed deep in her throat, insisting she didn’t forget about their rehearsal back at the station. 

Deep in  _ Susie’s _ throat, she corrected herself. She was almost easier to wear than the clothes Olivia had on to stay in character.

Susie was a woman who had no family of her own, who had met the man she loved at work. Rob and his deep blue eyes were her whole world. 

They had met at their previous job, where she had waited tables and he had served drinks, where she had entertained customers with her looks while he had overseen secret card games. They had only left because their relationship was frowned upon – their previous boss hadn’t appreciated them getting distracted with one another. 

Quite like partners shouldn’t get personal. Unless they need to go undercover, of course. That made pretty much anything fair play, and they were both counting on that.

Undercover, there was nothing wrong with Elliot’s possessive hand clutching at her waist whilst his other shook Alvin Hobbes’, or his poorly-hidden, uncomfortable fidgeting as their potential boss ran his eyes lazily all over her body, asking for her hand and kissing it slowly. 

Nothing wrong, except for the churning in his stomach at the man’s scrutiny of his partner’s body. Elliot acknowledged then that this feeling would become something quite common to him for as long as this undercover gig lasted.

“Our previous job didn’t allow for relationships between employees,” he said, his arm firmly poised on the back of Olivia’s chair, before breaking into a dry laughter. “Because  _ that’s _ where they drew the line. With everything else that happened there.”

“That why you left it?” Hobbes asked. “Or were you guys fired?”

Elliot turned to Olivia, but she smiled and looked away, leaving it to him to speak for both of them. “We left. We kept it on the down low for a while, but I wanted to marry her,” he turned to Hobbes again. “I knew from the beginning that she was the one.”

“Not a problem for me,” Hobbes said. “Actually my last bartender and waitress were married too, like I said on the phone.” 

“Why did they leave?” Olivia asked, feigning curiosity to test the man’s reaction. 

“Just moved out of town,” Hobbes replied vaguely, and Elliot’s fingers squeezed Olivia’s shoulder in response.

“Lucky us, I guess,” he smiled. “I mean, I think we’re the perfect fit, aren’t we?”

Hobbes chuckled, pushing himself up from his chair. “I like your cockiness, Rob. Maybe you could both work tonight and show me you really are the best fit. How does that sound?”

Elliot could tell from the man’s eagerness that there were currently no other candidates at their level, if there were any at all. While he knew their profiles had been created precisely to fit the needs the man described in his ad, Elliot feared their resumes might be  _ too perfect _ , that they could raise suspicion. Maybe that was what this test drive was all about– proving they were the real deal.

“Absolutely, we’d love to, right, babe?” he replied, exchanging a smile with Olivia.

“Of course,” she confirmed, directing a seductive smile at Hobbes that brought the softness of her lips right back onto Elliot’s mouth. He bit down on his lower lip to fight the feeling. 

Hobbes stood up promptly. “Come on, I’ll show you the basics.” 

Munch had been right. The place looked like it had once been just a cheap bar. Now it just looked forgotten, abandoned. Drinks were definitely not paying the energy bill. Hobbes showed them the ropes and implied that Elliot –  _ Rob _ – would be responsible for a few  _ other  _ transactions. He accepted the instructions naturally. 

Olivia’s –  _ Susie’s _ – job was to look good and keep the customers distracted while the  _ transactions  _ happened at the bar, as well as to leverage on her close connection with  _ Rob _ to decode wordless communications and instructions and act on them in a timely fashion as needed. The reason for Hobbes’ preference for a couple was becoming clearer to them.

Nothing had been strategized between them beyond that, and they’d gone into that interview knowing that – they’d gone in pretty much blindly. They weren’t even expecting to start working right away, but it was a Friday night, and it was obvious Hobbes wanted to get back in business as soon as possible. So just like that, before there was any time to prepare for anything, the doors opened.

Soon after, while Olivia’s empty eyes contemplated the empty tables, her empty tray tucked between her arm and her side, Elliot approached her from behind, his cheek landing right next to hers, his arms around her waist. She realized this was what it was going to be like from now on. Their guarded restraint would have to become this detached, implied consent. Their physical silences would become loud touches. She was going to get so devastatingly used to it. She was already halfway there.

On their fucking first night undercover. Fuck.

Her eyes fluttered closed as a breath ripped a sigh from her throat, but she told herself he would interpret it as acting. At least they would always have that excuse at the ready. She felt so vulnerable again, so weak, and she hated the notion that it was all because of him. Any fear related to the operation, to her father, to anything else outside of their bubble was completely shunned out.

When Olivia opened her eyes again, her resigned hands had already covered Elliot’s forearms, and she realized for the first time that his Marines’ tattoo had been concealed. She traced the contours with the tips of her fingers as she saw them in her head.

Rob hadn’t been a Marine. 

He was no choir boy either.

“The drug operation is pretty much what we had guessed,” he whispered into her ear, inhaling her shampoo as he nuzzled her temple, the softness of her backside against his crotch not lost on him. Her feather-like touch on his arms, the girth of her waist trapped under his grip: he struggled to stay focused. “Keep your eyes open for the customers, remember what the bouncer said about some of them being interested in Patricia.”

“Think they’ll be interested in me?” Olivia mused out loud, while her heart longed to ask if the man underneath the mask of Rob, towering over Susie, would be interested.

A tender kiss on the crook of her neck emptied her lungs. Elliot’s arms released her while his voice sealed the deal, whatever deal, all deals. “I have no doubt.”

Olivia glanced in the direction of the door and caught Alvin Hobbes watching them from the distance with an approving nod.


	6. Two birds, one stone

6 - TWO BIRDS, ONE STONE

  
  
  


The text message had been casual, almost domestic.  _ Meet me for lunch? _ So he had found her card. Olivia had said yes: she figured lunch was a good opportunity to see him and explain she would be harder to reach from that night onwards.

As if she owed this man any explanation about her whereabouts. 

Strangely, she felt like she did, even though she knew better. This man was a  _ perp _ , for crying out loud, and she had agreed to have lunch with him like he was a part of her life.

Well, he  _ literally _ was. He was responsible for her existence, after all, and she told herself that was the only reason she felt this pull towards him.

Edward seemed incredibly tired when she found him already sitting at the diner booth, from which he waved at her to call her attention. His shoulders were slumped, and his weight seemed abandoned against the rest, his arm draped over it, his elbow invading the space of the empty booth behind theirs. His breathing was labored, like he had run a mile, but the only effort he seemed to have made was managing himself into that awkward sitting position.

“Hey there, Olivia,” he said with some forced enthusiasm that didn’t come through in his features. 

“How are you feeling today?” she asked guardedly as she sat down.

“Like shit,” he chuckled. “The day after is always the worst, I feel like I took a beating.”

She knew that. Not only by the hollow look in his eyes, but also from all the research she had done on multiple myeloma: she had spent all morning online reading about the disease, its symptoms, the treatments, the side effects of the medication.

She told herself the reason for it was just curiosity.

She also told herself she had an agenda coming to this lunch, so she made an effort to stay impartial to his report on his health and got right down to business.

“Look, Edward…” she started. “I came here today because I want you to tell me what it is that you really want from me.”

He straightened up on his bench as well as he could. “What do you mean?”

“I’m talking about your dramatic entrance. Coming to the station, claiming you had confessions to make, demanding to see me. Why? If you wanted to meet me, you could’ve just…contacted me.”

Answers. That’s what Olivia had come here for.

“I don’t know…” he shrugged. “I guess I thought you wouldn’t see me otherwise. Seriously, would you have given me the time of day if I’d just come to you and said…” He bent towards her and lowered his voice to a whisper. “ _ Hey, I raped your mother _ ?” 

Olivia couldn’t decide what hurt the most: the contents of the statement or the casual way he spoke it, like it was no big deal. She took a deep breath and answered truthfully. “Maybe not.”

“There you go,” he said without looking at her as he lifted a finger to call the waitress’ attention, and Olivia flashbacked to her own experience waiting tables the night before. He turned to her. “Are you ready to order?”

“You haven’t answered my question.” She crossed her arms and ignored his practical inquiry. “Why approach me at all?”

He turned to face her again, temporarily giving up on his endeavor. “I told you. I wanted to tell someone what I did. Also, I wanted to get to know my daughter before I died. Two birds, one stone.”

The stone that kept hitting her was that word —  _ daughter _ . It killed her every time.

  
  
  


***

  
  
  


Elliot welcomed the cold spray as it hit his face. He let the water envelop his body, focusing on the sensation as he tried to empty his mind. So much had changed in the last twenty-four hours.

He felt himself growing harder when Olivia unceremoniously entered his mind again. Even after spending the whole morning in bed with Dani, who had shown up unannounced again with breakfast and had actually proven to be an effective antidote to the blue balls from the previous night, it was still the thought of Olivia’s lips and her body against his that caused his unrelenting erection. Even the cold water couldn’t keep it down. 

His eyes shut closed, and he was instantly back in the lounge, pulling her by the arm.  _ You can’t walk away from me like this _ . Her eyes growing wide, her scent, so close to him. His fingers still had her skin engraved on them, even as they slid up and down his length. He could still feel the softness of her lips against his, and he groaned when he imagined them wrapped around him, replacing his fingers’ motions right now. He increased the speed, remembering what her tongue had felt like, the feel of her body pressed against his, the smell of her hair, of her skin when he had leaned into her neck and kissed it, her shuddering reaction. 

He whispered curses as he came, harder than any of his standard-procedure orgasms with Dani.

She was still there when he got out of the bathroom. She had even made coffee, like she knew her way around his place and his stuff almost better than he did himself. The domesticity bothered him. 

Dani laughed when she laid eyes on him. “Are you going undercover as a lumberjack?”

Elliot looked down at his flannel shirt and jeans. “I’m just supposed to dress casually,” he said, reluctantly accepting the coffee mug she was offering and wondering what other concessions the act entailed.

He needed her gone. His and Olivia’s undercover clothes were already packed in the trunk of their rental car, parked outside, and she was going to meet him so they could drive to the bar together. 

And move in together. 

He needed Dani gone. He didn’t want Olivia to see her; he was  _ ashamed _ . He chastised himself for even having let her in at all, for the way he had stupidly believed it would do anything to stop the impure thoughts that crowded his mind and riled up his body, well aware as he was that they were all directed at someone else.

“Well, as you know, I need to get ready,” he said, sipping at her strong coffee to minimally mask the attempt to make her leave. “I’ll go live somewhere else for the op, so I have to get going.”

“Where?” she asked, eyebrows knitted like she didn’t believe him.

His voice was a monotone as he volunteered the information he hoped she knew she had no specific right to. “Above the bar where I’ll be working as a bartender.”

“For your murder case?” She looked away and hid behind her mug: maybe she was imagining the worst details possible since he hadn’t given her any — precisely because she couldn’t handle them. 

“Yep,” he confirmed, but before he could say anything else, the doorbell rang.

_ Fuck _ . There was no way that wasn’t Olivia.

Dani’s eyes widened with incredulity. “You waiting for someone?” she asked.

“Yes,” he turned to her on his way to the door. He had no other option at this point. “My  _ partner _ .”

The partner he had kissed and touched the night before, the one who had been in his thoughts, keeping him awake for most of the night. The partner that had starred in his dreams in the couple hours of sleep he’d gotten before Dani had knocked on his door with bagels and complaints about him not picking up his phone and leaving her to her own devices on a Friday night. 

As an afterthought, he realized this casual thing with her wasn’t casual enough for her to know that it wasn’t going anywhere and that she was in no way entitled to Friday nights, or any other nights for that matter. 

But it was Olivia’s presence behind the closed door that was giving him gooseflesh, taking him back to the night before, and he was afraid for a moment that she would know when she saw him — that she would know she had refused to leave his mind even hours after she had evaded his touch.

His guilty hand wrapped around the doorknob, holding all the anticipation as he confirmed through the peephole that it was really her. His partner.

The partner he had just jerked off to in the shower. 

He opened the door to reveal her. Olivia wore a long, black trench coat that probably hid  _ Susie’s outfit _ , of which only the long nails, black stockings, and high heels showed. She was also carrying a duffel bag that was supposed to contain her personal items. 

“Hi,” she said in a small voice through tight lips, also wearing an apprehensive expression that spoke volumes of uncertainty regarding their dynamic, but as Elliot had predicted, it soon changed to one of surprise with a hint of disgust as she moved past him and into the living room where Dani now stood, sporting her coffee mug like a trophy. Elliot thanked God she was dressed, but he knew the bare feet gave her away. “Oh, I didn’t realize you had company.”

It was kind of unbelievable to be standing in the same room as Olivia and Dani. To Elliot, it was as if one couldn’t exist in the presence of the other. 

“Ah…I don’t…I just…” he blabbered. 

“You don’t?” Dani laughed. “What am I?” she pointed at Olivia. “Is this your partner?”

“Yes…” he confirmed, hissing for a while longer than necessary as both women narrowed eyes at each other. He found a point on the floor to fixate his stare and made the awkward introductions, his hand waving in the general direction of each of them in turn. “Olivia Benson, Dani Beck.”

Olivia smiled with her head cocked to the side. “Oh, we’ve met.”

Dani tilted her head to the opposite side with a puzzled expression and a smile of her own. “We did?”

“Don’t you remember?” Olivia smiled caustically. “I came to the precinct looking for Captain Cragen. You were sitting at  _ my  _ desk.”

Dani nodded slowly. “Oh, yeah, I remember. You looked a little different though. To be honest, I wasn’t sure you were a cop. But I remember now. You came in looking for Elliot, but he wasn’t there, so you went to the Captain’s office. But I had no idea it was you, the  _ famous _ Olivia people wouldn’t shut up about. I thought if you came back, there would be a party or something when people saw you.”

Olivia chuckled, letting a big smile linger on her face even though she was clearly not amused.

“Anyway, we need to get going,” Elliot finally intervened, sending Dani a meaningful look. 

‘Oh, of course,” she said, clearly pretending she hadn’t yet realized that Olivia’s arrival was her cue to leave, and disappeared into his bedroom. This couldn’t get any worse. 

Olivia set the duffel bag on the floor and kept her eyes there, her hands behind her back. She kept switching her weight between her feet. 

“She um…” Elliot started. “She just showed up a while ago—”

“You don’t need to explain anything to me, Elliot,” Olivia said in one breath, looking up at him and raising a dismissive hand. “I’m not  _ actually  _ your wife, so…” 

“Wife, huh?” Dani Beck said as she emerged from the bedroom, putting on her leather jacket, and Elliot registered her glare fixated on him with his peripheral vision while he watched Olivia biting a sly smile. 

“It’s a shame we never went undercover together, isn’t it?” Dani approached him, clearly leaning in for a kiss, but he turned away and walked to the door, opening it for her and avoiding the glances of both women. She hesitated. “Give me a call when you can,” she said, then turned her head around. “Bye, Olivia, it was nice meeting you—I mean, seeing you again.”

Elliot couldn’t close the door fast enough on the enduring wake of her departure. 

  
  
  


***

  
  
  


It was a stab to her chest to see Dani Beck inside Elliot’s apartment, her braid all messed up, barefoot, drinking coffee from his mug, going into his bedroom to retrieve her shoes and jacket. Olivia wondered just how much earlier she would have needed to arrive to find her completely naked, maybe wrapped up in a towel or sheet.

She had tried not to give much thought to what had happened between them on their first night undercover, Edward and his disease serving as the perfect distraction. She believed she had done a pretty decent job at that. However, it had all reemerged inside her with a sour taste when she had seen that woman, clearly at home in his apartment, and realized that the physical contact they’d shared because of the operation had meant nothing to him — and should most certainly mean nothing to her either.

She was fairly certain she’d been able to keep her cool back at the apartment, but in the awkward silence of the car ride, her tongue was itching to say something. 

He didn’t have to explain anything to her. She knew that. Should she let the fact that he had tried carry any weight at all? Would that be considered a legitimate enough reason for her to ask for information? Maybe her disclaimer back there had helped rid him of any obligation. 

Before she realized, though, she was hearing her own voice. “I didn’t realize you were seeing her.”

“I’m not,” he replied instantly, triggering a nervous laugh from her. 

“Come on, Elliot. It’s been almost two months since she left the unit. Sorry to break it to ya, but you’re seeing her, maybe you’re even in a relationship with her.”

“It’s not a relationship, it’s barely even a fling,” he rushed to correct, but the admission in his words cut almost as deep as the sight of the woman in broad daylight.

“Whatever you say,” she threw at him, injecting feigned nonchalance into her voice. 

Nothing more was said on the matter. Silence set in as Olivia remembered she had to somehow get in the mood to go undercover tonight — with him. Maybe touch him. Maybe kiss him.

Knowing Dani Beck had been all over him just a few hours prior. 

  
  
  


***

  
  
  


That had gotten out of hand. Elliot had never wanted things with Dani to go that far. She was supposed to be just a distraction, a pastime, some company when he felt lonely. He would certainly have preferred that Olivia didn’t know about it.

She was acting like she was fine with it, but she was weird around him throughout their shift, distant.  _ I didn’t realize you were seeing her _ . She’d said that with a smile, and it had made him wonder just how bothered she was that he might be seeing someone.  _ I’m not actually your wife. _ Maybe that had been nothing but the perfect excuse for her to clearly set their boundaries after the night before.

Either way, that was where they were, each retreating to their separate corner as they worked their shift, a clear line setting them apart from  _ Susie and Rob _ . 

Maybe that was for the best.

There were a lot more customers tonight, both the kind who just had a quick drink and broke a deal with him at the bar and the ones that sat alone at their tables all night with a drink, staring aimlessly at whatever sport was on the TV — there were even a few that occupied the pool tables, which had been completely forgotten the previous night. 

Elliot had to watch Olivia serving them drinks in a very short skirt, sweet talking them to try and get some information that could help them with the case. 

He couldn’t help but wonder if part of her effort tonight wasn’t an attempt to get back at him for Dani Beck. The few interactions they’d had were cold and dry, with barely any eye contact. Alvin Hobbes, who still had them under the microscope, watched one of those and approached him at the bar, pointing at the bottle of Jack. Elliot took it and poured him the drink. 

“At the doghouse with the missus?” the boss asked. 

“How’d you know?” Elliot chuckled, doing his best to act naturally.

“Oh I’ve been married once, I know what that’s like. What did you do?”

“Who says I did anything?” Elliot feigned annoyance and innocence, the bad acting actually incredibly well-suited to the situation.

Hobbes grinned over his glass before taking a sip. “Just the way she’s acting. She’s  _ pissed _ , my man.”

Elliot huffed, running his hand over his short hair and adapting the truth as well as he could. “She saw me talking to an ex.”

With a thud of his glass against the counter, Hobbes asked for a refill. “Whew, an ex? You’re in deep shit. Something to it?”

“No!” Elliot said with conviction. “I swear! She won’t believe me.”

Hobbes emptied his tumbler again and set it down, standing up from his stool. “You go over there and show her she’s the one you want. Or at least do a  _ very  _ good job acting like she is. Otherwise you’ll be sleeping downstairs on your first night living here.”

Elliot nodded slowly. “You know what, that’s exactly what I’m gonna do,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

It turned out that there was something to his undercover boss’ advice. Words were not Elliot’s forte, but actions spoke way louder, and he realized he didn’t want Olivia to get the wrong idea about Dani, for whatever reason. 

Screw their boundaries. 

He watched her coming back from a table with two empty beer bottles that she discarded, and when she distractedly started to make her way towards the bar, he intercepted her, sneaking her into a secluded corner.

“What are you—” she started to say, but Elliot pinned her against the wall and leaned in to kiss her, not giving her a chance to refuse or escape.

He rejoiced in the sweetness of her mouth: it was the taste he’d been craving all day. He parted her lips with his own rather roughly, demanding entrance, which she granted. She released a soft moan as she granted him access, and after the initial shock, she slid her hands up his chest, wrapping both arms around his neck and willingly kissing him back now. 

Elliot slipped a hand under her shirt, gripping at the skin of her waist, his fingertips reaching for the clasp of her bra but not undoing it, just playing with it. He wanted to speak to her, but he didn’t want to break the kiss. 

It was way too  _ good _ .

A moment later, he unlatched his mouth from hers, kissing his way across her cheek to her ear. “Hobbes noticed you’re mad at me.”

“So  _ that’s _ why you’re doing this,” she breathed, the disappointment clear as day, but Elliot paid more attention to the fact that she didn’t try to deny it. 

“Sort of,” he said against her neck between bites. At each one, she gripped harder at his nape with one hand, the other snaking down his back, pulling him to her. 

It seemed like Susie had already forgiven her husband.

Elliot pulled back a little to look at her; she was undeniably waiting for an addendum to his answer. “He said to come tell you the other girl doesn’t mean anything to me.” Before Olivia could react in any way, Elliot closed the distance and seized her lips once again for a few more seconds, just to break contact entirely the next moment. “She doesn’t. She never did.”

  
  
  


***

  
  
  


The bar stayed open late, until almost three in the morning. When Elliot and Olivia were already placing the chairs on top of the tables, Hobbes approached them and congratulated them on their second night of work.

“You both seem like you’re quite at home already,” he said. “The customers seem to like you as well. Now go upstairs and get some rest.”

They didn’t need to be asked twice. 

The upstairs apartment, which was originally their crime scene, was a mess of boxes and suitcases. The NYPD had arranged everything so it would look like they were really moving in, with a u-haul full of boxes containing books, records, plates, silverware, and the basic things that furnished a house, which they’d towed in with their rental. 

While Olivia showered, Elliot found the linen box, and he made the bed with the best-smelling sheets he could find. 

Of course it was only one bed. They were supposed to be married. 

There wasn’t even a couch; it was just a big room, big enough to fit a bed, a wardrobe, a bathroom, and a kitchen of sorts, with a sink, stove and fridge that faced the bed. A TV hung from the ceiling, but when Elliot tested the remote, it did not work, which probably meant the batteries needed to be replaced. 

Olivia came out of the bathroom wearing a tank top and sweatpants, visibly very tired and brushing her teeth. “You found sheets,” she said, eyes on the bed, trying not to worry too much about the fact that they were about to share it. 

Elliot hadn’t even dared sit on the bed yet, not without her permission. “You can take the bed, obviously,” he said. “I found a comforter that I can spread out on the floor and—”

“Absolutely not,” she countered, then disappeared into the bathroom again. As she washed her mouth, she gathered courage to pretend that sharing a bed didn’t mean a thing before going back out there and meeting his uncertain stare. “We’re undercover as a married couple; we have to sleep in the same bed. I think we can handle that.”

Her tone was coy, but Elliot wished she would speak for  _ herself  _ on that matter. Well, he knew even that would be a lie — at least from the way she had responded to his touch downstairs. 

Neither of them could  _ handle it _ .

But he shrugged and agreed, almost challengingly. “Okay.”

Olivia had expected him to fight her harder on it, but maybe he really didn’t feel like it was a big deal to lie in bed next to her, maybe not nearly as big of a deal as lying in bed next to Dani. Maybe he would think of her while Olivia filled her place, trying to reconcile the fact that  _ she _ was the intruder now, the replacement.

_ She doesn’t mean anything to me _ , he’d said, contrary to her mind’s torturing thoughts.  _ She never did _ . Olivia’s brain had no comeback for the way he’d kissed her to prove his point, but it could still claim he’d only done it for Hobbes’ benefit. 

He took off his flannel shirt, revealing a grey t-shirt underneath that he decided to keep on. He took a pair of sweatpants with him to the bathroom, adhering to her dress code, while she took her side on the bed before she could respond to her instinct to run the hell away from there. 

A few minutes later, he came back out and found the lights off but for the nightstand lamp and Olivia lying in bed, facing up as though looking at something very interesting on the ceiling. 

She tried to act like she wasn’t aware of him getting closer and closer until they were under the same sheet. He didn’t buy it.

The smell of Olivia’s shampoo coming from her damp hair was overwhelming when he leveled his head with hers on top of his own pillow. He wanted to roll towards her and dip his nose into the strands, fall asleep surrounded by her locks. 

“What are you thinking about?” he asked instead. 

_ Us, lying in bed like this _ , she thought, but her alibi emerged with very little effort. “Edward,” she responded flat-out. “I had lunch with him today.”

“What?” Elliot rasped, unable to keep his voice from raising a little. “Are you forgetting—”

“I’m not forgetting anything,” she cut him off, waving her hands and turning her head towards his, their eyes meeting, the intimacy of their horizontal argument giving her chills. “I just used the opportunity to tell him I wasn’t going to see him anymore, that I was going undercover for a case and that I was done with him.”

He shook his head. “You don’t owe him any explanation, and you certainly did not have to do it in person.”

“Elliot…” her voice softened, solemnly ignoring his reproachful tone. She recalled Edward’s breathlessness, the pain in his expression. “Each day he looks worse, seems weaker.”

“Good,” he rasped.

It was her turn to raise her voice a little, still careful not to be overheard in case Hobbes hadn’t left yet. “Can you shut up for a second? I was reading about his disease. It’s supposed to be very aggressive. And so is the chemo. People with multiple myeloma rarely live longer than five years.”

Elliot let out a long sigh. “He said from the beginning that he was dying. And why does that matter anyway?”

“I went to see him today because I wanted to know why he came to me. Or do you really think he just wanted to confess his sins? He could have gone to a priest for that.”

Elliot didn’t want to encourage the subject of  _ Edward _ or anything related to him, but he figured it was a good thing she was trying to share it with him. “What did he say?”

Her voice was firm when she responded. “He said he wanted to get to know me. You know, before dying.”

“And you believed him?” Elliot jabbed quickly.

Her eyes were pleading with him while she still maintained control of her voice. “Well, why would he lie?” Her question to him held more meaning than the words she spoke, but she knew he wouldn’t lie to her if he had a good enough reason to doubt her  _ father’s _ motives. 

He was silent for a moment, debating whether he should poke holes into the story she’d bought so easily, but he just couldn’t live with the possibility that she was fooling herself.

“Liv…” his tone softened. “When you read about his disease and the treatment…was there anything else besides chemo that could treat the condition he has?”

She turned away, her focus turned upwards once again, his eyes suddenly too much to handle. She regretted telling him. “What do you mean?”

It dawned on her before he spoke, but she waited anyway, holding her breath.

“You know, something that a  _ family member  _ might help with.” She was silent for several seconds, her eyes moving as if she were reading something written on the ceiling. “Liv?”

When she spoke next, her voice was just a whisper. “I’m such an idiot.”

Elliot propped himself up on one elbow for a moment. “Why? What are you talking about?”

“Bone marrow transplant,” she said, and he could hear the tears she was fighting. “A bone marrow transplant is one of the possible treatments for multiple myeloma. That’s what he wants from me.”

Elliot sighed and, on some level, regretted helping her get to that conclusion. He reached for her, sliding his arm under her neck and pulling her with a hand wrapped around her shoulder.

“What are you doing?” she said, taken by surprise, crossing her arms in front of her chest as a barrier against the unexpected contact.

“Just come here,” he said, pulling her to him, and she did not fight him any longer, letting herself roll over to him and rest on his chest, an arm draped over it. “It’s alright.”

She sighed, letting the feel of his skin against her cheek obliterate any thoughts of where Dani Beck had or had not been earlier. Right now, Olivia felt entitled to his body somehow, and she used it to maintain her grip on her sanity. “How did I not see this?” she whispered.

“It’s gonna be okay,” Elliot assured her. “Let’s just go to sleep, we’re both exhausted.”

Olivia wanted to stay awake and punish herself with incessant thoughts, but Elliot’s warmth seemed to silence the voices. She wasn’t strong enough to fight the comfort he provided or the sleep that soon enveloped her.


	7. Blur

7 - BLUR

  
  
  


Her breath was slow and steady as she released it into the warm protection of his chest. His hold around her was fast, solid, but not overwhelming. Somehow, her right leg had slipped into the space between his, and now lay caught between his thighs. 

His scent was a lullaby. 

The rise and fall of his chest soothed her, in tune with the light drizzle that fell outside. His arms cradled her as her fingertips absentmindedly traced paths along his collarbone through his t-shirt. She could feel his guarding chin securing the top of her head. 

She slowly welcomed wakefulness, taking a deep, contented breath. She was afraid to open her eyes and lose sight of this feeling. 

It felt like she was where she  _ belonged _ , even though she was sleeping in their vics’ bed, in the arms of her fake husband. 

Her partner.

The awareness of his fingers playing with the hairs on the nape of her neck dawned on her gradually, helping her realize he was also no longer fully asleep. 

The relaxed rhythm was broken when she took in a sharp breath, and his seemingly instinctual response was to hold her tighter.

With his  _ whole  _ body.

As his thighs tightened around her leg, they drove it upwards into his crotch, and she felt him harden and enlarge through the thin materials that shielded him. 

Her hand gripped harder at his skin, as though trying to hold on a bit longer before it all faded away.

She didn’t want to face the world outside. 

“Liv,” she felt the air escape him and skim her eyelids as he tilted his head down a little, and she wondered how willing he was to pretend they were both still deep enough asleep to feign innocence.

“Hmm?” she murmured, intending only to acknowledge him, not wake him or break the spell, her head raising carefully to align with his.

She peeked with one eye when their noses touched, finding both of his eyes still closed. A glimpse of reality flashed through her brain then, uninvited, the frustration of her earlier breakthrough ripping into her like sharp wire cutting the skin. 

_ Bone marrow transplant _ .

It was so obvious; it had been from the beginning, she realized now. Of course a ruthless rapist,  _ her mother’s rapist _ , would have a selfish agenda. He’d been lying every time he had tried to tell her that his reasons for coming to her even hinted at any benefits not directed at himself.

She was certainly not contemplated as a beneficiary of any of it. 

But Elliot nuzzled her cheek, his lips grazed her chin, and suddenly Edward and his ulterior motives disappeared. Her eyes closed again as she intuitively positioned her mouth in Elliot’s path. 

Their lips touched. 

Like second nature, he caught her lower lip between his — softly, feather-like. She responded, pulling his upper lip eagerly, demandingly. His arms held her closer as the sleep-laden, aimless touching became an unmistakable, intentional kiss. 

If neither one of them interrupted it, it could just go on. 

And on. 

But her eyes sneaked a peek at the outside world again, and an unsolicited thought of Dani Beck invaded her mind: the way she had moved around his place like she owned it, like she owned  _ him _ .  _ She doesn’t mean anything to me _ , he had said, but the accompanying kiss he’d given her had been requested by Alvin Hobbes. 

Right now, no one else was watching — this kiss was for their closed eyes only, and it was proving very effective in erasing the unpleasant images as soon as they popped into Olivia’s head, like her sick, ill-intentioned  _ father _ , or the sight of a very comfortable Dani in Elliot’s apartment.

Olivia tried not to make any disrupting sounds, hoping to extend the kiss and its welcome effects, but when both of their lips parted, and their tongues naturally darted towards each other, she released a small moan that ignited a groan from Elliot. 

The hand he had around the back of her head stilled, and she stopped moving entirely inside his embrace.

He pulled away a few millimeters, their mouths barely disentangling, both pairs of eyes still closed, foreheads leaning on each other. The grip of his arms never faltered, and her leg was still trapped between his, her thigh pressed against his erection.

It was too much to deny at this point, and she knew it.

“What are we doing?” Elliot whispered, seemingly reaching the same conclusion. 

“Nothing Rob and Susie haven’t done before,” she answered, her fingers pulling at his t-shirt pleadingly, the unspoken  _ I need this  _ burning her from inside out. 

Olivia had meant to refer to the way they had already kissed several other times in the short period they’d been undercover, but she realized now how her reply could be understood as alluding to acts that married people like Rob and Susie were in the habit of performing together.

Whichever interpretation Elliot had chosen, his movements became more vehement, more assured. He thoroughly kissed her now. 

For a minute, there was no rush, but then, something shifted in him, and he flipped her over, caging her between his thighs and the forearms he set on each side of her head on the mattress. 

Both pairs of eyes were now open wide. The rain picked up, capturing the mood change. 

Elliot knew he should be trying to stop this. It was their first night sleeping on the same bed as Rob and Susie, the bloodstains of Geoff and Patricia’s demise barely camouflaged in the web of lies that connected Hobbes’ need to replace his employees and the two detectives’ convenient, fake marriage. 

Their first night, and they hadn’t been able to last through it without annihilating the already-confusing, if at all still-existing, blurred lines. 

Could it all still be stopped? Did either of them even want to? He knew he should be trying to rein in his instincts and wishes, or at least feel guilty that he couldn’t. But he wasn’t, and he didn’t. All he could do now was watch the dim moonlight that sneaked in through the slits in the blinds reflected on Olivia’s blackened, brown eyes.

Elliot’s glance was alight, two beams of blue in the darkness, his labored breath speaking in the silence of the night. Olivia’s own breath caught in her throat as she stared back at him, her heart slamming against her ribcage, its pace timing the air filtering in and out of her lungs, the task of breathing suddenly almost foreign to her. 

“It’s just Rob and Susie,” she encouraged, the alarm in her voice contrasting with the calm in his gaze as she tried to sound firm in hopes of reassuring him, but if she was being really honest, mostly herself.

“Stop me, Liv,” Elliot rumbled, a warning that hit her right between the legs before he leaned into her neck and started to trail open-mouthed kisses toward her clavicle. 

No, her silence reiterated.  _ I need this. _

She reached for him, her hands framing his face, and rose to collide with him in the middle, lips crashing together again with voracity. 

“I want you,” she huffed into his mouth, relieved, bunching the grey cotton up his torso, her knuckles rough against the exposed skin. 

He broke contact to finish yanking the t-shirt over his head with one hand while the other stroked her cheek, her neck, her shoulders. Her encouraging hand grazed his forearm, leading it down to her breast through her tank top. 

She moaned when his fingers squeezed her flesh, her nipple caught between two of them beneath the fabric, but his other hand was already working on removing the black garment. He rolled it up and, when it was time, she raised her arms to let him pull it off of her. 

Elliot descended over Olivia, their chests pressing against each other with urgency, her nails digging into his skin as she welcomed his weight on top of her.

Their lower halves met with emphasis, his hard length pressed to her intimately, her hips rising to receive it, both breathing out with frustration directed at the clothes that still kept them apart from each other. 

His fingers curled around the hem of her sweatpants. 

“Last chance,” he urged.

“I  _ want  _ this,” she stated impatiently, then looked deeply into his eyes as she made a request she thought he wouldn’t refuse to fulfill. “Help me forget. Forget everything. Edward, Dani.  _ Everything _ .”

Olivia knew he couldn’t resist the impulse to comfort her, especially when she knew he felt somewhat responsible for the pains she wanted him to appease. 

She was also counting on the desire she saw gleaming unapologetically in his eyes whenever their gazes inevitably met. 

He mulled it over just for a second, the guilt over parading Dani in front of her and pointing out Edward’s less-than-pure motivations fueling his need to act on his unspeakable desires like gasoline to a fire. Getting over his moment of hesitation, he yanked her pants and underwear down in one sweep move, her calves kicking to help him get the clothing off while her own fingers undid the hoop in his drawstring rushedly. 

Moments later, they were both naked, every inch of skin tingling at the unbarred contact. 

Elliot didn’t know where to start. Now, contemplating her naked body, he could finally admit to himself just how many times he had wished he could see her like this, own up to each time he had imagined what every inch of her body looked like,  _ felt _ like. 

His hand glided up the outer side of her thigh, grabbing the flesh of her hip for a moment, then sliding upwards in its path. His thumb caressed the skin of her stomach and followed the outline of her belly button before he allowed his other fingers to climb the steps of her ribs, all of them ultimately meeting around one large, swollen breast: it was all softness and firmness, the velvet-like feel of the darkened skin of her areola wrinkling before his eyes to expel the aroused bud.

Olivia whimpered from the depths of her soul when his mouth closed around her nipple, alternating soft suckling motions and impetuous tugs while his fingers pinched the other one, the accumulated sensations sending her heartbeat into overdrive while she tried to make sense of what was happening. 

This was a big leap from a kiss in the lounge or making up at the bar for their boss’s benefit.

They were about to inevitably and undeniably  _ fuck _ .

Olivia’s right hand clutched his cropped hair while the left one’s nails drew a map of her most secret yearnings on his back. 

He felt rewarded by her sharp response against his skin, the redness of her breasts from his ministrations, and the wetness that pooled between her legs when his hand finished its path down her belly and up her thigh to meet her core. She threw her head back when his middle finger gently parted her, and he smiled.

“Elliot,” she breathed voicelessly as his fingers explored, caressing her clit, teasing at her entrance.

“Look at me,” he demanded; he wanted to witness every moment, now that them, together, was the view awaiting them outside of their eyelids. 

Olivia complied hesitantly; she was afraid her earlier thoughts would seep into her mind again, but when she met his stare, it only added to the overwhelming sensation of his touch, and it suddenly hit her that  _ this  _ was now reality, too. 

She knew she would eventually need to look away from this, but not right now.

“Holy shhh—” she could barely manage when her lungs demanded a quick, deep intake of oxygen as a response to his index and middle fingers entering her without warning. Her mouth opened without a sound when his thumb nudged her clit in circular motions as he repeatedly pulled his fingers in and out. “Fuck!” she cried out when he added a third finger and intensified his motions. 

She never wanted him to stop.

Elliot watched as her breath became ragged and brought out moans with every exhale while he continued to tease her, and he was certain he had her completely under his mercy when he felt her hand firmly wrap around his length, immediately starting up and down motions that had him jerking and wavering in response.

Of course she was going to fight him for control. This was Olivia; there was nothing passive about her, even in a fragile state, even admitting she needed him.  _ Help me forget _ .

He could do some forgetting of his own, and so he let his hand’s motions slow and soften until they came to a full stop, and he helped Olivia turn him over to straddle his legs, and when she bent down to take him whole into her mouth, he let the divorce and Dani and his worries and everything else fade, engulfed by the sensation of his cock engulfed by her throat.

“Jesus Christ, Liv,” he grunted as she slowly slid up, massaging his underside with her tongue before wolfing him right down again.

His hand fisted around her hair as he helped her up and down, and he couldn’t help but buck up his hips, reeling at the fact that he was fucking into Olivia’s mouth. She responded with moans that he felt against his skin from inside as his head hit deep within her and from outside as his other hand wrapped around the column of her throat — he just wanted to feel her work him, and it was making him impossibly hard.

Olivia raised her head all the way off of him, sending him a cocky look and a half-smile before bending down to take his tip into her mouth one last time, sucking roughly and rejoicing at his vocal responses. Before she could decide what to do next, he grabbed her upper arms and pulled her to him, sliding a hand up to the back of her head to pull her down to a slow, passionate kiss that lasted for a couple of minutes. 

She felt his touch traveling down her body and anchoring at her hips, coaxing her to raise them and helping guide her heat towards his length. Still kissing him, she sunk down onto him, finally giving in to the need to have him inside of her. He filled her entirely, and she became acutely aware of his size and thickness as she tried to adjust. 

She broke the kiss and raised her torso to help better her angle as she slid up and down, each time taking him deeper. She saw a smile creep up on his mouth as he moaned softly, and she bit her lip at the power she already knew she had over him.

Olivia possessively wondered if Dani had this power over him, if  _ Kathy  _ had ever had this power over him. She possessively added circular motions to the roll of her hips, finishing each of them with precisely-timed movements as she clenched and unclenched around him. She possessively guided his hands to her breasts, throwing her head back as he started to tease her nipples again.

Elliot could barely believe he was inside Olivia, feeling her slide and roll around him, her walls sucking him in as skillfully as her mouth had moments ago. He filled his hands with her ample breasts, then dug his fingers into the skin of her back, her abdomen, the swell of her ass. He applied more strength, because he knew she could take it, because he hoped he would mark her.

Rob was the kind of man who would want to mark the woman he loved, and Susie was the kind of woman who would showcase the traces of the man she loved with pride.

If he focused on Rob and Susie’s love, he could still pretend that his feelings weren’t the ones taking the wheel when he abruptly raised his torso and pushed her to lie on her back, wrapping her legs around his shoulders and pinning her arms down as he thrusted wildly into her, hitting her even deeper from this position. 

Olivia began to cry out as Elliot assumed a punishing rhythm, the sound of his hips slapping hers filling the room along with their moans and grunts. She would usually not have enjoyed the way he had taken control away from her, but right now, practically immobilized beneath him, she admitted that she would let him do pretty much anything to her, anything that put her at his mercy, that gave her the sensations she was experiencing as pleasure began to achingly build up in the pit of her belly.

“El, please,” she whimpered when she was close, and he indulged her, increasing the rhythm.

“Come for me, Liv, right now,” he grumbled, the commanding tone of his voice enough to send her over the edge as he pummeled into her unrelentingly. “Let go.”

His smile was the last thing she saw before she squeezed her eyes shut, crying out his name along with a string of unintelligible curse words as she came, hard, harder than she could remember ever having come with anyone else. 

Elliot was a bit surprised upon realizing just how much he had loved the sensation of making her come. He was a bit frightened upon imagining the lengths he would go to in order to do it again — to be able to do it over and over again, whenever he wanted. 

He fucked into her a few more times as he felt the beginning of his orgasm, the vigor of his thrusts elongating the sensation for as long as he could while he grunted her name along with words of adoration he had never said to anyone before her. 

Silence set in, troubled only by their attempts to catch their breaths. Elliot rolled out of Olivia, lying on his back and pulling her to lie on top of him, their feet finding the pillows that had previously been caught underneath their heads. 

Apart from their upside-down disposition, the way they lay together mimicked the configuration they’d been in when they’d first woken up, before their slumber had turned into lovemaking. Just like before, Olivia was invaded by the almost-intruding safety that being in his arms instilled in her.

The scattered hairs on his chest tickled her nose with a mixture of soap and sweat and a sense of peace and security that she hoped would last until after the sun came up again. 

Elliot’s eyes finally grew accustomed to the dark, and he could see the darkened lines that mold had drawn on the white ceiling over time. He squeezed Olivia’s body in his arms while he could, painfully aware then of just how fleeting every moment was. 

She looked up at him, wistfully, a similar thought crossing her mind as they exchanged one last acknowledging look before protecting their gazes behind closed eyelids again.

Both of them rehearsed harmless words to break the silence, but those never saw the light of day — or the darkness of the night, caught forever in the depths of their minds as they settled for silence and allowed the rain that still poured outside in a constant spatter to lull them back to sleep.


End file.
